Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Amazon Kindle - anyone have one?

Actually publishing has reasonable royality rates. Authors get about 10% on paperbacks, and 12-15% on hardbacks. At least in most catagories. I understand that the genre romances pay less and have much worse terms on right reversions. IIRC SF books the rights revert to the author when the book is out of print for 6 months, the romances it's more like 10 years.

For a breakdown of costs see http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-costs.html

While you have a point, I find it ironic that you're saying this on a fanfic forum. Clearly some people would still write for free.

Julie

Actually, ebooks are being released at the same time as their physical versions these days, so each ebook sale is one less hardback or original paperback sale. I think Amazon is beginning at these prices because the idea is that Kindle books will eventually replace physical books, so that will be where publishers have to make their money. And that money pays for editors, layout people, cover artists, etc., not just the physical cost of producing the book. I know that in post-secondary ed, we're looking toward entirely ebooks in place of textbooks within the next 10 years. That's what high school librarians in my area are anticipating, too.

And as someone who is responsible for providing books-on-tape for students who have visual or reading problems, I'm looking forward to the day when all textbooks are ebooks, available to be read by a text reader.

P.S. I ordered my Kindle 2 yesterday.

That's awful! I can't concentrate on ebooks as well as on actual paper. Converting textbooks to completely electronic format would seriously crimp my education!

There are other reasons to dislike the idea - someone doing research isn't going to be very happy about having to access (and presumably pay for) dozens of books just for a line or two in an essay or whatever.

If the Kindle does become the primary distribution channel for books there are also real concerns about government, business, etc. monitoring or controlling access to books, and possibly censoring them - e.g. someone looks at a significant sample of books on explosives then gets added to a no-fly list; someone writes a book on Amazon's business practices that could impact the company's profitability, and it doesn't show up in the list of books available for download; blocking for sexual, religious, or violent content; and so forth.

Before that can ever work, some sort of lending library process would have to be developed, where people can check out books on their ebook readers for a 2 week period through their local library, and at the end of that time, the text vanishes. The discussions I've been in on weren't about it replacing libraries so much as taking the place of the piles and piles of books students have to buy for class.

Another reason to be very wary of replacing paper with something as proprietory as the Kindle is that file formats keep changing - there would be problems if thousands of books only existed as the etext equivalent of Betamax, with DRM controls in place that made it impossible to transfer them to more recent formats, and no way to get them unlocked because the company that owned the technology had gone out of business.

I'm not saying that this is likely for Amazon, but I really doubt that anyone has got the technology completely right, or will do any time soon. It's all going to go obsolete, probably sooner rather than later. It's happened with Betamax, laserdiscs, and probably in the near future ordinary DVDs; anyone who bought HD DVDs or players in 2006-8 is facing that problem now. It happens with all computer games sooner or later; and will undoubtedly happen with the current e-text formats.

A quote that I probably haven't got completely right: "This little baby is going to replace CDs soon. That means I'm going to have to buy the White Album again." - Men in Black

I agree that proprietary formats can be very limiting. But "ebook" doesn't necessarily mean the Kindle. You can get PDF-format ebooks on your computer now, and the Sony Reader can display PDF files. At the moment, it doesn't format them real well, but there's a converter program for the Sony. I can buy e-book versions of textbooks now, I think, actually.

Couple that with cheap printers and printer connections, and you can print out anything important. Last quarter, I had a math textbook that was 4-5 inches thick, with 4-5 pages of practice problems for every page of useful information. It made it very difficult to go back and find specific formulas. Something more editable/selectively printable would have been very useful.

PJ

No argument there - I'm in the eBook business myself, and PDF and HTML aren't going to go away any time soon. But I don't put any DRM limitations on my files, anyone who buys them is free to make copies and use them on any platform that supports them. Unless I've misunderstood badly, the Kindle format by default is DRM locked so you can only use files on the machine that originally downloaded them.

There are also authors how publish their own ebooks without a publishing company and/or Amazon in the middle, so they get close to 100% of the books.

And there's software to turn PC, mobiles, PDA, etc into ebook readers, although those may not read Amazon's format.

I have recently experimented with the .epub and the .mobi format, it's quite interesting what one can do and how the outcome of a conversion to those formats is very dependent on the source used. PDF did rather badly, but the original file format worked quite well.

Depends on what you're trying to do - if you need illustrations, tables, etc. there aren't any good alternatives to PDF.

And as if by magic something more interesting appears - the Kindle DX is looking a very different ball game - bigger, only slightly thicker, and includes native handling of PDFs.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0015TCML0

Unfortunately a lot more expensive at $489 and still has the same limitations outside the USA, but a lot closer to the sort of thing I want.

Thanks for the link, Marcus. I'm not interested in something that big; however, the auto-rotate feature and the installed PDF reader would be extremely useful.

I recommend taking a look at the e-Slick, from Foxit. e-Slick link

It's about half the price of a Kindle, and they've got educational discounts if you're a teacher or student. It's got txt and pdf capability (and just about everything else can be MADE one or the other), support for SD cards . . . no wireless or subscription or DRM capability though, but I don't want any of that. I'm very against DRM on the whole. If you buy something, you shouldn't get it hobbled as if you were already assumed to be a criminal. So you probably won't be able to use it with some purchased books, like anything from Amazon, but for fanfic and anything from Project Gutenberg, or other free pdfs and stuff out there, you'd be great. The e-Slick doesn't do text-to-speech, but it lets you listen to your music while you read, with a headphone plugin and mp3 capability. So it would also let you do audiobooks that way.

Anyway, I did some research recently on e-book readers. Wikipedia's list has about 10 total, though some are found only in other countries. You can see the specs, what they offer, how much they cost, etc. I know if I ever get one, it'll be an e-Slick, 'cause that suits me best.

Remember my worries about Amazon controlling the texts on the Kindle? I missed one- Amazon can delete them remotely.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html?_r=1

Apparently it has now happened several times, usually over copyright issues, but I can easily imagine other circumstances in which Amazon, or even a disgruntled employee, might choose to delete books that were sold legitimately.

Wow! Talk about an Orwellian future! (The irony is sickening.)

The Kindle sounds like a good idea - get loads of books in a small package - but stuff like this makes me deeply suspicious.

Signed: Technological Luddite.

And just to add a decorative layer of irony... the books that Amazon remotely deleted? 1984 and Animal Farm. Orwellian treatment of Orwell's books.

Double-plus ungood.

Since I have a Kindle, I'm keeping it... but I might back up to my hard drive a little more frequently. (It's way easy; just hook up a USB cable and it's treated like an external drive)

PJ

One of the people who lost 1984 was a student reading it for class. So he lost not just the book but all the annotations he'd done.

Hi Vicki:
I don't have a Kindle, but the way I understand it, you can send files to Amazon and they will encode it and send it to your Kindle.
I do see a danger of a lack of privacy there, as Amazon now possesses the fic you dl.

Hi Doranwen:
Thanks for the word on the e-slick. That looks interesting.

What I've been using is a HP iPAQ 211. I just bought it for $379 at Frys. I had a 111 before and just upgraded. It does .jpg, Powerpoint, Excel and Word (i.e. Office Mobile) and videos. It has stuff I don't use, but I can dl stories directly from my desktop to my mobile. The screen is smaller than a Kindle, but it fits in my hand.
It is not good for writing, though because it is a video keyboard and a stylus. It's possible, just not fun.

Artemis

I'm not even really a lurker around here anymore, but I'll poke my head out of the woodwork to say that I have a Kindle1 and adore it. I read books on it, but I've also been reading fanfic on it from day one. I used to print reams and reams of fanfic (in ridiculously small fonts to save paper). Now I couldn't even tell you the last time I printed any sort of fiction at all. (Before the Kindle I had an eBookwise, which was also really good for saving paper and carrying lots of text around with me everywhere I went, but the Kindle's screen is so much nicer.)

You can email documents to Amazon, as Pam suggested, for 15 cents. Or, if you're cheap like me or if you're concerned about privacy, you can download a free program called Mobipocket Reader 6.0 and convert files yourself. I have only used the email conversion system a handful of times, usually when I'm in a big hurry. 99% of the time I just download the story I want, import it into Mobi, and then sync it to my Kindle via USB. Easy, private, and free.

Two caveats: This only works with Mobi Reader 6.0; I'm told 6.2 doesn't support Kindle. And although I think it works with Kindle2, I haven't tested it myself or done a lot of research on the subject, since I don't have one.

It's also worth noting that you can backup your books via USB, including books you have purchased from Amazon.

There's a lot of information on Kindle and other ebook devices at MobileRead . I'd recommend their forums to anyone who's thinking of buying one; there's a lot of really helpful info there.