Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

i've not heard anybody explain yet why they don't do this. would be v handy.

I like the name Matchbook, that's a good one

Bet whoever came up with it felt pleased w themselves

i didn't specifically mean the matchbooks, but in general. haven't heard anything from publishers as to why they don't like it. it would cost them literally nothing to produce (as there is no physical product). maybe i have been looking in the wrong places...

It's price protection, I would expect. Talk to a publishing person and they will tell you that very little of the marginal cost of a hardcover book is ink and paper. The whole Big 5 antitrust case was based around the houses' desire to keep the ASP of an ebook close to that of a paperback, and avoid developing consumer expectations of ridiculously cheap ebooks.

but why is this not the case with music - a CD must cost about the same price as a book to make and is sold at about the same price

the same price - popular fiction, maybe, more or less everything else = no

new popular author in hardback still generally more expensive than new band's CD, even

OK yeah I guess - let's say same price as new vinyl then.
Anyway the point is, I don't see why there's so much reluctance to bundle paper and digital versions since from Amazon's pov it would further entice people to go digital and lock into the kindle ecosystem. From the publisher's pov, I don't know - are they expecting people to buy pay twice for difefrent formats? or are they worried about piracy?

this (which is about the cost of ebooks in general) http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/aug/04/price-publishing-ebooks suggests $3.50 or £3 to produce a hardback.

quoting:
"But if, says Levine, the real value of a book resides in the "text itself", then the delivery method shouldn't much matter. The fixed costs – acquiring, editing, marketing – remain unchanged."

this i also agree to. but a SECOND copy of the "text itself" in a different format, sold as a package, and one that can produced for virtually free, i don't see that damaging the perceived value of a hardback, in fact it adds to it.

it damages the perceived value of the ebook.

not really (to me). if bundled ebooks add perceived value (even at no added cost) this must mean they have value themselves.

do ebook prices change when the paperback comes out?

It adds another copy to circulation though, so it's a potential lost sale - as in you can buy the book, keep the ebook for yourself and give the "free" book as a present.

I agree it would be nice to get free ebooks but I can see why publishers wouldn't think so.

sure but, again, why is this not an issue when bundling mp3 codes with vinyls or "autorips" from Amazon?

or with library copies

also

I agree it would be nice to get free ebooks but I can see why publishers wouldn't think so.

I wouldn't consider a bundled ebook version to be "free" if I paid for the actual paper copy. This might not be the case from a legal point of view, but I'd consider myself entitled to duplicates in any shape or form (eg self-made scans or mp3s of me reading the thing out). Again I'm sure lawyers would tell me that this is not legally correct.

I guess someone could conceivably do on purpose what I did by accident, give the physical book as a gift and get the the ebook for themselves.

Some publishers have started doing it - I bought some real paper books straight from Verso and got digital copies of one of them (but not the others – rights issues? they haven't sorted out digital editions? idk).

I can sort of see a tangle of reasons it isn't more widespread - maybe rights issues, vague piracy anxiety, fear of giving Amazon more of the infrastructure if ppl want a .mobi, feels like giving away an extra sale in a very squeezed industry. Maybe that's enough? I was thinking there's some deeper protective attachment to/anxiety over the idea of the specialness of the book, but actually, I can see that if I went to the marketing dept or whoever, and said 'Hey look, new 1000-page Hilary Mantel (or whoever) hardback, no-one is carrying that on the tube - let's do a non-discounted edition with ebook codes (yes, marketing ppl, maybe they have to sign in to a special aren't-books-nice website that we run to get them)' then the piracy/legal faff/reader ecosystems/giving-stuff-away arguments might still be enough to kill it.

& actually might epub v mobi v whatever get you into a tangle with Amazon mucking you around over stocking the print edition? I suppose you just print another without codes. But that's a complication.

I bought a monograph by a small local publisher in Toronto last year that mentioned a free ebook copy in the indicia, and posted the paper book home to myself & read the ebook on the road

Bezos has just raked in a bit more blood money. Yesterday, after years of flirting with the idea, I ordered a Kindle for $49. Even with the existence of Calibre, it just seems ugly that it won't support ePub, but all the ereaders have similar proprietary ego problems, so it's all a matter of pick your poison.

epub is more of an open standard (being just zipped html and some xml config files). there's optional drm on top of that but there's no way around that being closed source and at least there seems to be one provider (adobe) which is cross platform. all this, and amazon drm, has been cracked anyway.

in other news, local whsmith no longer does kobo minis, nor website, nor kobo.com. they've only had white for a while now so guess stock is finally gone. cheapest option is now the touch at £60 or the glo at £90.

If Kobo ever do a glow with page-turning buttons, I'll probably switch over... they get pretty solid reviews.

got my $44 paperwhite in the post yesterday; super light but not quite as much lighter feeling than the iPad mini I bought last weekend as I'd expected. and e-ink is weird, looks like an etch-a-sketch. but I wanted it because it'll work well in heavy sunlight, and for my kids, so I'm happy.

i am p sore about being excluded from that promotion

Bundling digital books with physical ones would have tax implications in the UK, as the VAT on printed books is 0%, whereas ebooks are the standard 20%. For no good reason as far as I'm aware.

i am p soure about being excluded from that promotion

New, non-promotion price paperwhite is still indexing. What's up with that?

Just deleting unindexed stuff and then will load up again incrementally. Seems to help it get unstuck.

Welcome aimless

it just seems ugly that it won't support ePub

part of that might -- *might* -- be technical. i might get this wrong in part, but epub is based on html and css, and those hardware, non-tablet kindles are garbage at rendering webpages, or at least they used to be, i think. maybe they could beef up that capability, and maybe part of this does have to do with business reasons, but i think there could be another side to it too.

and the thing that would lend some credence to your argument is the fact that the kindle app for ipad will not let you read epub, while ibooks will, even though the former's format of choice is some modification of .mobi and the others is a modification of .epub. that being said, i don't think ibooks supports .mobi either. heh.

your best bet is just to get an ipad, which can support basically whatever you need it to support due to the fact that it has a robust app ecosystem.

i have the kindle app for the kindle store, ibooks for epub and ibooks, and pdf expert for pdfs. if there were another format i needed to view, i could see if one of those apps would handle it or install another one.

it's hard to argue with $49 though.

esp. if you're going to be mainly reading kindle books!

I read on my tablet the odd time but its def a screen in a way a kindle's isnt and my eyes know the difference v quickly.

Theyre different beasts and a tablet really doesnt sub for a kindle imo

yeah e-ink is key, fuck an ipad just for reading

yeah also why pay like 6 times more than you have to... you can easily convert any format. and like i said above you can be chiller with a kindle and not worry about it getting stolen as much. or getting all slow with an os update.

Fully indexed at last! Now to gentle add back stuff

D'oh! If you click on the Unindexed Titles thing it tells you what they are.

Now I can enjoy the eye-soothing e-ink in tranquility.

Thought I'd lucked onto another kobo mini in Hammersmith just then but despite having them on display they didn't have them for sale and the display models are dumb copies apparently (not sure I believe that as you can switch mine into demo mode).

This page is kind of useful, although it takes hella long to load: https://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights

Seem to recall that when I searched for text on all items, it used to only put the book on top of Most Recent if clicked all the through to the hit but now it seems to so even if I just click through once to the book. Do u see?

Perhaps I am misremembering.

On another note, just figured out this second how to get page number displayed on paperwhite. Have to pull down the menu, on a book that has page numbers, then set yr Reading Progress. I'm sure most of you already knew this.

One problem with the Nook that I have noticed is that when you connect it to the PC to add content to the micro sd card it resets all your bookmarks.

That drives me fuckin nuts

unlimited