Mike writes "Google's latest decision to try its hand selling eBooks promises to make life in the eBook world more interesting, and will likely spur a standards war that in the end may prove beneficial to many consumers. Google's eBook store will pit it directly against Amazon and Amazon's Kindle — an enormously popular eBook reader. This will push many companies to create eBook readers to take advantage of Google's new store, and will flood the market with tough choices. Google does not have a dedicated eBook reader yet, but it seems a logical next step for the search giant."
The whole "can't you get a netbook instead" thing has been beaten to death, twice, with a dead horse tossed on top the second time. I mean, seriously. People have suggested this, the iPhone, the Nintendo DS, etc. Yeah, yeah, they do oh-so-much more. Different products. If you can read for extended periods of time on an LCD, and have a place to recharge it conveniently, then get a netbook.
The rest of us will enjoy immitation printed paper, with weeks between charging.
There's no reason you can't have e-paper on a netbook.
With existing tech, it would make it pretty useless for everything but, well, reading text. With refresh rates measured in seconds, you can forget about scrolling, for example; or animations.
Outstanding. The screen is great, the battery life is outstanding and the form factor is remarkably comfortable. Frankly, that's a huge difference between the Kindle and a netbook. The Kindle is designed for one thing and that's reading for long periods of time. Netbooks aren't. I'm curious how many people who insist "a netbook can do it and its cheaper and no DRM and and and" have ever actually held a Kindle to see just how important the form factor component really is. Frankly, I don't care that I can read the books on my iPhone (another device people are saying is a good alternative.) I've done that and other than being able to sync where I am in the book between my Kindle and iPhone, I don't enjoy the experience nor do I find reading on the phone as relaxing or comfortable. I don't care about DRM issues. There are plenty of free books out there and I tend to buy books rather than going to the library, so if I was going to buy them anyway, then buying them for a device that I own and like isn't really a big deal to me. (Whether that point of sale is at Amazon or Google.) I don't need a netbook. I bought a kindle because I needed something that I could read for hours at a time and not have to worry about recharging the thing every 3-5 hours.
Google is not a hardware company. I'd look for an API and not much else.
Came here to say something like this.
Since it's already been said, let me clarify:
Google will not make a proprietary e-book reader. They want their wares on as many machines as possible. Whether it's firmware, applications, 'appliances', or whatever. Eyeballs == data == better targeting of ads == higher profits on ad sales.
Releasing an e-book reader themselves pitches them squarely against the very companies they want to be using their wares, to enable them to sling ads to everyone.
Google is an advertising behemoth. For all the neat-o things they produce and we use, they exist to make money by slinging ads at people. Every business move they make should be considered in light of the fact that they will choose the route that nets them the most eyeballs -- and in this case, this means making an API or firmware for other companies to use. They do not want to alienate ad targets who use other e-book readers.
This is really, really, huge. We've had a number of articles on slashdot that clearly point out the danger Amazon poses to the e-book market. They're following an iTune-like model, with similar DRM, similarly ham-strung hardware, and they're waging a war to control e-book distribution. Google has the muscle to turn the tide in this battle, and to open the e-book market to many players, not just Amazon and Sony.
Consider an Amazon Kindle vs an Eee PC. The Eee PC has a bigger screen, costs less, has real wifi, and is a freaking great e-book reader. The only problem? F**king Amazon and Sony have locked up rights to distribute many of the most popular e-books. Screw e-book readers, IMO. Netbooks running a real OS (Ubuntu in my case) is the way to go. E-book readers like the Kindle are just another trap for us to fall into, where we lose choice, and pay outrageous prices for massively limited hardware and software, just so we can read the book we actually want to buy.
And what about the battery life? The fact that the Netbook probably weighs twice as much? The free WWAN connection you get with the Kindle? Seamless integration with Amazon's eBook store? How about booting up the laptop (or even waking it from sleep), entering your password and opening the eBook every time you want to read a paragraph or two on the bus? As a matter of fact, don't you think most people would look at you pretty strangely if you pulled out a netbook on a bus?:p
Sure, you can use a netbook as an eBook reader (I do, at least for large PDFs and other crap my smartphone can't handle), but it's always a bit of a hack. If you're only planning on reading in places where you'd have your netbook out anyway, I guess it's not a problem - but for people who like to read in the back of a taxi or in the john or on the bus, pulling out a netbook every time is just plain annoying.
I had a look at the E-Book Reader Matrix [mobileread.com]. I decided to buy a Bookeen Cybook. It's cheaper than the Kindle and it supports DRM-free formats as well. I am using it to read TXT, PDF, and Mobipocket documents. It's not a free software device though. The applications for displaying PDFs, MobiPocket,... are proprietary. However you can download the source code of the customised ARMLinux (as required by GPL) from their website. The battery charge supposedly allows for 8000 page flips. But you can't help people looking at you strangely when you do anything intellectual.
I wonder if anyone else sees the possibility of using android's API's for touch screen to make devices to for ebooks? Not that I like the ebook market or care for it, but it certainly seems logical.
Android based app that's free and open source even, with an essentially open standard so anyone can program nearly anything to connect up. Between an iphone/ipod touch app and an android app, there's just enough space for a dedicated ebook reader to flourish.
Maybe a nice addition to a ebook reader is a way to share a book with friends, maybe via bluetooth, letting you transfer a set amount (like in Google books where you only see part of the book) and then a linking system to allow you purchase the rest.
At 400$ a kindle, laptops start to look a little more attractive, especially with emerging tech like color eink and olpc's use of eink in screens to lengthen their battery life. I would love to buy a kindle, but its not cost-effective for me, and better products seem right around the corner.
Kindle doesn't work outside the US, period. We Canadians don't get it either(though I suspect that has something to do with our world-renowned awful telcos and monopolistic nationally propped up book broker Indigo more then anything else.)
Really, I saw someone on the bus in Australia reading a kindle... well I assumed she was reading it, now you mention it she could have just been starring at a blank screen.
There must be some business logic to Amazon's confining their ebook sales to their own format, their own device, their own network, and their own home country. Don't know what it is though.
I'd be buying my ebooks from Amazon if I possibly could. But I can't. They don't distribute over the Internet so I can't download to my preferred device. They don't make Whispernet available outside the US so there's no incentive for me to ditch my preferred device for a Kindle.
While I am typically very much anti-piracy, I do draw the line at books.
There is a large collection of books sitting on my shelf that I have never opened. This is because I bought them only to put them on my ebook reader de jour (palm -> nokia 770 -> kindle2).
I'm sure that this violates some laws, but I feel like those laws are unjustified. If i were to take the time to scan the books that I purchased, then put them on my reader, that would be fair use, no? How is it different if I outsource the jo
Can I have it? It apparently supports PDF, TXT, RTF, EPUB, LIT, PPT, WOLF, DOC, CHM, FB2, HTML, DJVU, MP3, TIFF, JPG, GIF, BMP, PNG, RAR, ZIP, and MOBI. I can get pretty much any book I want in one of those formats or something that can be converted into one of them by Calibre or Stanza Desktop.
Amazon's Kindle an enormously popular eBook reader.
I'm not sure the description "enormously popular" is deserved. Just because it is out selling other eBook readers doesn't make it "enormously popular"; how many of these have actually sold?
It doesn't seem that the eBook market has really expanded to the point of anything yet being worthy of the "enormously popular" status, AFAIK.
It's semantics, really, but the popularity of a product can be gauged across the entire population (pretty much useless), it can be gauged across the potential market (useful), or it can be gauged against the existing market (most useful [for marketing]).
If the Kindle's share of new e-book purchases is over 85%, I'd call it enormously popular.
What I'd like to see is an extensive used Kindle market. It bothers me to no end that every time one is purchased, it does an extra point of damage for each one tha
I'm not sure the description "enormously popular" is deserved. Just because it is out selling other eBook readers doesn't make it "enormously popular"; how many of these have actually sold?
Amazon hasn't released any numbers on how many were sold. However, I frequently use the Mom Scale to informally gauge the popularity of a given technology. How it works is like this: if my 65-year-old mom has heard of a piece of technology, then it's popular. If she has purchased or downloaded a piece of technology, then it's enormously popular.
I found out yesterday that my mom just bought a Kindle, hence the Kindle is enormously popular.
Not sure why your post was modded Insightful as you've obviously haven't looked into this at all. Most eBook readers support unencrypted PDF. There are also conversion utilities to convert PDF for various ebook formats so that your device doesn't have to do the formatting on the fly.
I see that there's a CHM to HTML conversion app (Mac only it seems, and another commercial one), and with the HTML in hand, you can create an ePub book using a program called Calibre.
It's pretty messy as far as formats and conversion utilities right now, and you have to sort a lot of it out, but there are ways to read your stuff which shouldn't be too difficult for a techie.
Woman inspires us to great things, and prevents us from achieving them. -- Dumas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knight_of_Sainte-Hermine [wikipedia.org] The Last Cavalier (originally published in France in 2005 under the title Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine) is an unfinished historical novel by Alexandre Dumas. It is believed to be Dumas' last major work, and the story was lost until 2005, when it was announced that an almost-complete copy had been found in the form of a newspaper serial. While a nu
I'm probably missing something obvious, but I have yet to understand why we need to insert a middleman store into the chain between producer and consumer.
It seems to me cheaper and more efficient for the publisher of a book (or the author himself) to provide downloads directly.
For physical products, it makes sense to provide some kind of middleman to take care of the hassles involved with delivering the product; but for electronic products, it's not at all obvious to me why such a middleman is necessary.
As an author, I'm still struggling with the question of whether to make electronic versions of my books available; but if were to do so, (and especially having carefully read the contract that Amazon makes you sign to make your work available for the Kindle) I wouldn't be inclined to insert another profit-making entity between me and my readers.
Attention. If I can look at and search for thousands of books in one place, I am more likely to notice your book if it is there.
The more you think about it, the less that actually makes sense. The more books that are there, the less likely you are to notice my specific book.
Having tried to find decent apps in Apple's App Store (especially free games), I know that eventually volume becomes more of a negative than a positive. I wind up searching the net for people's "top X list of free iphone games", etc. So in reality, what I'm looking for is a content portal with reviews and discussion groups done by area of interest that can the
I'm probably missing something obvious, but I have yet to understand why we need to insert a middleman store into the chain between producer and consumer.
It seems to me cheaper and more efficient for the publisher of a book (or the author himself) to provide downloads directly.
One benefit I can see is that it gives you a single place to go get books from. I don't have to remember the web sites for 100 authors, or 50 publishers. Instead, I can just remember a single site which aggregates all the books together. Sure, I'll end up paying a higher monetary cost due to the middleman, but presumably the time cost savings is enough to me that it is worthwhile.
It's sort like having an iPhone App Store instead of hundreds of independent software publishers to download from. Another benefi
You need the publisher less than you need a retailer.
A publisher (mainly) provides publicity, editing, manufacturing, and, the only thing they are really good at, getting your dead tree into brick&mortars. You can contract editors, you can do publicity on the internet, and small run print options have almost reached parity with bigger presses. Most bookstores will even order PoD books now and some even take PoD returns on the theory that if you were interested enough to order it at a store, someone el
I have been buying ebooks directly from the publisher Baen:
www.baen.com
For 4 years now. There prices are reasonable $7.99 for a typical release of book that is available in hard cover or 5.99 for a book that is available in paper back.
They release the books in multiple formats including HTML. So the books that I bought 4 years ago and read with my palm I can now download again to my iphone and continue to read it.
The prices are reasonable so I do not even think about looking for alternative sources for the book *cough bittorrent cough*
I have been extremely happy with there products. I just wish other publishers would follow suit so I can continue buying ebooks of other authors that I enjoy.
Curiously I just sent an email to Amazon.ca early today at how (since I am in Canada) I cannot get the kindle app or kindle books and how I have not bought any books from them for 4 years because I only buy ebooks.
Well everyone says that the customer should decide and I have decided to only buy books as ebooks and I prefer without drm; baen meets those requirements so they get my business and thus far they are my sole source of fantasy/science fiction books that I have bought in the last 4 years.
The original article seem to focus entirely on a Amazon vs Google battle. But in that article is missing one point: Kindle is not available outside the US. That is: you need an USA registered Credit Card with a USA address to buy one. Yes there are work around - but why should I support a flawed business model.
So for me living outside the US I had to look else where for for eBooks. And if you do you will soon notice that there are better eBook reader then Kindle and that there are better eBook shops then Amazon. Amazon is largely capitalising there good name here. In fact currently it is more like Amazon vs the rest of the world.
For me there is no doubt who is going to win in the long run. While USA is a large marked but it does only represent 5% of human population. Well, unless Amazon changes there business model that is.
Who cares about switching? Amazon went for new users.
Yep. I never used iTunes because it didn't run on my OS, and it had DRM (light DRM, but DRM nevertheless). The first time I ever bought music online was from Amazon, and now I'm buying all my music on Amazon. All Amazon had to do to get my business was to offer me the opportunity to pay my money in return for an mp3 file, which nobody else was willing to let me do.
The Kindle is exactly analogous. It has a proprietary format, with DRM. Google says they want to have a format that works on a variety of devices, which presumably means no DRM. If they execute the idea well, I'll probably buy my first electronic book from Google.
Wouldn't the Kindle be more analogous to the iPod? Both can use a proprietary, DRMed format. But both also work with well-known, non-DRMed formats. Also, if Google's formats are really open, then won't people be able to read them on Kindles?
I was right at the part of my e-novel where it said: "And the killer's name was....(Low Battery) Unfortunately, I was sitting on the commode, and could not reach the AC adapter.:(
So that's what the kids are calling it nowadays?;)
Low had tried to frame his brother the rapper, 9V. But the power required to electrocute the victim was too high -- and 9V demonstrated he had full charge by having the detective place both his contacts on his tongue. While 9V lost a lot of street cred for getting tongued by a male detective, it did show that he was fully-charged and quite innocent.
So then Low Battery tried to frame his sister, Anita Agatha Battery, but AA Battery simply didn't have the brute power necessary for the job.
Out of blood relatives (and it had to be one of the siblings, as established by DC-NA testing), by process of elimination, it was Low Battery who depleted his power by committing the electrocution, with terminal results.
Always the same back and forth on this topic every time eBooks are mentioned.
Someone says smartphones/PDAs are better, then someone else (like me) responds that the benefit of an eInk display is:
1) There is no backlight, which helps alleviate eyestrain during long reading sessions. 2) There is no screen refresh, so you can read for a very long time without killing your battery.
Having read extensively on a homebrew-enabled PSP with a LCD screen and now on a Sony PRS-700, I know that the LCD screen does hurt m
PDF is a terrible format for ebooks. It's designed to instruct a printer how to draw on paper of a specifc, fixed size. An ebook format needs to deal with different screen sizes (possibly wildly different - I read ebooks on my 1280x800 laptop screen and my 177x220 phone screen) and different text sizes (my long-sighted father is going to want larger text in his ebooks than I do). PDF doesn't allow for the kind of reflow that a good ebook reader is going to employ.
No, we will see a format war once Amazon has to start considering implementing ePub on the Kindle (because they can no longer ignore other stores, that only carry their books in ePub or DRMed mobi (which doesn't work on the Kindle, because its mobi DRM implementation is different from the standard mobi implementation, even though they own Mobipocket. Can you spell "lock-in"?), or because they want to be able to sell books to people who don't own a Kindle.
Anyway, ePub can technically already do typesetting,
Obvious next step... (Score:4, Insightful)
I seem to remember people saying the same thing about cell phones, but Google is not a hardware company. I'd look for an API and not much else.
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Neither is Amazon and you'll get my Kindle when you pry it from my cold, dead hands...
Seriously, I don't care who sells them so long as they offer the content I want and the cost is right.
Re:Obvious next step... (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole "can't you get a netbook instead" thing has been beaten to death, twice, with a dead horse tossed on top the second time. I mean, seriously. People have suggested this, the iPhone, the Nintendo DS, etc. Yeah, yeah, they do oh-so-much more. Different products. If you can read for extended periods of time on an LCD, and have a place to recharge it conveniently, then get a netbook.
The rest of us will enjoy immitation printed paper, with weeks between charging.
Parent
Re:Obvious next step... (Score:5, Interesting)
The rest of us will enjoy immitation printed paper, with weeks between charging.
No, some of you will enjoy that, the rest of us will enjoy reading a good old fashioned book.
Parent
Re:Obvious next step... (Score:4, Insightful)
There's no reason you can't have e-paper on a netbook.
With existing tech, it would make it pretty useless for everything but, well, reading text. With refresh rates measured in seconds, you can forget about scrolling, for example; or animations.
Parent
Re:Obvious next step... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"Can't you get a "Netbook" for less than a Kindle and read whatever you want on it (and then some) DRM free?"
Maybe, if I didn't already have a personal MacBook Pro and a work MacBook Pro.
I suspect a Netbook isn't as good as a kindle for reading-while-walking, nor as good for reading-on-a-very-crowded-bus.
Re:Obvious next step... (Score:5, Interesting)
Came here to say something like this.
Since it's already been said, let me clarify:
Google will not make a proprietary e-book reader. They want their wares on as many machines as possible. Whether it's firmware, applications, 'appliances', or whatever. Eyeballs == data == better targeting of ads == higher profits on ad sales.
Releasing an e-book reader themselves pitches them squarely against the very companies they want to be using their wares, to enable them to sling ads to everyone.
Google is an advertising behemoth. For all the neat-o things they produce and we use, they exist to make money by slinging ads at people. Every business move they make should be considered in light of the fact that they will choose the route that nets them the most eyeballs -- and in this case, this means making an API or firmware for other companies to use. They do not want to alienate ad targets who use other e-book readers.
Parent
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Eyeballs == data == better targeting of ads == higher profits on ad sales.
Umm. Eyeballs == more viewers for the ads == profit. Applications that report back == better targeting.
Think spammers emailing everyone vs. spammers with spyware.
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Data collection is as dependent on eyeballs as ad-serving is.
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Google is not a hardware company
Not strictly true. http://www.google.com/enterprise/pdf/gsa_datasheet.pdf [google.com]
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Re:Obvious next step... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is really, really, huge. We've had a number of articles on slashdot that clearly point out the danger Amazon poses to the e-book market. They're following an iTune-like model, with similar DRM, similarly ham-strung hardware, and they're waging a war to control e-book distribution. Google has the muscle to turn the tide in this battle, and to open the e-book market to many players, not just Amazon and Sony.
Consider an Amazon Kindle vs an Eee PC. The Eee PC has a bigger screen, costs less, has real wifi, and is a freaking great e-book reader. The only problem? F**king Amazon and Sony have locked up rights to distribute many of the most popular e-books. Screw e-book readers, IMO. Netbooks running a real OS (Ubuntu in my case) is the way to go. E-book readers like the Kindle are just another trap for us to fall into, where we lose choice, and pay outrageous prices for massively limited hardware and software, just so we can read the book we actually want to buy.
Parent
Re:Obvious next step... (Score:4, Insightful)
And what about the battery life? The fact that the Netbook probably weighs twice as much? The free WWAN connection you get with the Kindle? Seamless integration with Amazon's eBook store? How about booting up the laptop (or even waking it from sleep), entering your password and opening the eBook every time you want to read a paragraph or two on the bus? As a matter of fact, don't you think most people would look at you pretty strangely if you pulled out a netbook on a bus? :p
Sure, you can use a netbook as an eBook reader (I do, at least for large PDFs and other crap my smartphone can't handle), but it's always a bit of a hack. If you're only planning on reading in places where you'd have your netbook out anyway, I guess it's not a problem - but for people who like to read in the back of a taxi or in the john or on the bus, pulling out a netbook every time is just plain annoying.
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Re:Obvious next step... (Score:4, Informative)
I had a look at the E-Book Reader Matrix [mobileread.com]. I decided to buy a Bookeen Cybook. It's cheaper than the Kindle and it supports DRM-free formats as well. I am using it to read TXT, PDF, and Mobipocket documents. It's not a free software device though. The applications for displaying PDFs, MobiPocket, ... are proprietary. However you can download the source code of the customised ARMLinux (as required by GPL) from their website. The battery charge supposedly allows for 8000 page flips. But you can't help people looking at you strangely when you do anything intellectual.
Parent
android/touch screen? (Score:2)
I wonder if anyone else sees the possibility of using android's API's for touch screen to make devices to for ebooks? Not that I like the ebook market or care for it, but it certainly seems logical.
If I am wrong, please feel free to correct me.
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Cost (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets hope they can bring the price down to 'every man'. 400 for a kindle is pretty steep for a lot people, even during the best of times.
Re:Cost (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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The fact that they don't work outside the US and Canada is probably a bigger problem.
But yes, if they were $200 and worked here (Australia) I'd probably buy one.
Even though that's like my yearly book budget.
Re:Cost (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm...no.
Kindle doesn't work outside the US, period. We Canadians don't get it either(though I suspect that has something to do with our world-renowned awful telcos and monopolistic nationally propped up book broker Indigo more then anything else.)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Really, I saw someone on the bus in Australia reading a kindle... well I assumed she was reading it, now you mention it she could have just been starring at a blank screen.
Re:Cost (Score:4, Interesting)
There must be some business logic to Amazon's confining their ebook sales to their own format, their own device, their own network, and their own home country. Don't know what it is though.
I'd be buying my ebooks from Amazon if I possibly could. But I can't. They don't distribute over the Internet so I can't download to my preferred device. They don't make Whispernet available outside the US so there's no incentive for me to ditch my preferred device for a Kindle.
Parent
The real questions is: (Score:3, Interesting)
Will they be selling books with or withOUT DRM?
I own a Hanlin V3, and to a great extent stopped using it, as I can't get the books I want for it.
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While I am typically very much anti-piracy, I do draw the line at books.
There is a large collection of books sitting on my shelf that I have never opened. This is because I bought them only to put them on my ebook reader de jour (palm -> nokia 770 -> kindle2).
I'm sure that this violates some laws, but I feel like those laws are unjustified. If i were to take the time to scan the books that I purchased, then put them on my reader, that would be fair use, no? How is it different if I outsource the jo
Re:The real questions is: (Score:4, Informative)
Can I have it? It apparently supports PDF, TXT, RTF, EPUB, LIT, PPT, WOLF, DOC, CHM, FB2, HTML, DJVU, MP3, TIFF, JPG, GIF, BMP, PNG, RAR, ZIP, and MOBI. I can get pretty much any book I want in one of those formats or something that can be converted into one of them by Calibre or Stanza Desktop.
Parent
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon's Kindle an enormously popular eBook reader.
I'm not sure the description "enormously popular" is deserved. Just because it is out selling other eBook readers doesn't make it "enormously popular"; how many of these have actually sold?
It doesn't seem that the eBook market has really expanded to the point of anything yet being worthy of the "enormously popular" status, AFAIK.
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If the Kindle's share of new e-book purchases is over 85%, I'd call it enormously popular.
What I'd like to see is an extensive used Kindle market. It bothers me to no end that every time one is purchased, it does an extra point of damage for each one tha
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Amazon hasn't released any numbers on how many were sold. However, I frequently use the Mom Scale to informally gauge the popularity of a given technology. How it works is like this: if my 65-year-old mom has heard of a piece of technology, then it's popular. If she has purchased or downloaded a piece of technology, then it's enormously popular.
I found out yesterday that my mom just bought a Kindle, hence the Kindle is enormously popular.
Parent
Forget about proprietary eBook formats (Score:4, Insightful)
I want an eBook device that can read the eBooks I already bought and own.
They are in PDF and some on CHM format.
If I am going to spend $300 or more for an eBook device I might as well buy a Netbook that can use PDF and CHM formats for the same price.
Re:Forget about proprietary eBook formats (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure why your post was modded Insightful as you've obviously haven't looked into this at all. Most eBook readers support unencrypted PDF. There are also conversion utilities to convert PDF for various ebook formats so that your device doesn't have to do the formatting on the fly.
I see that there's a CHM to HTML conversion app (Mac only it seems, and another commercial one), and with the HTML in hand, you can create an ePub book using a program called Calibre.
It's pretty messy as far as formats and conversion utilities right now, and you have to sort a lot of it out, but there are ways to read your stuff which shouldn't be too difficult for a techie.
Parent
As it will be forever a beta... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Unfinished Books! (Score:2)
Bottom of Slashdot page:
Woman inspires us to great things, and prevents us from achieving them. -- Dumas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knight_of_Sainte-Hermine [wikipedia.org]
The Last Cavalier (originally published in France in 2005 under the title Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine) is an unfinished historical novel by Alexandre Dumas. It is believed to be Dumas' last major work, and the story was lost until 2005, when it was announced that an almost-complete copy had been found in the form of a newspaper serial. While a nu
Why do we need stores? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm probably missing something obvious, but I have yet to understand why we need to insert a middleman store into the chain between producer and consumer.
It seems to me cheaper and more efficient for the publisher of a book (or the author himself) to provide downloads directly.
For physical products, it makes sense to provide some kind of middleman to take care of the hassles involved with delivering the product; but for electronic products, it's not at all obvious to me why such a middleman is necessary.
As an author, I'm still struggling with the question of whether to make electronic versions of my books available; but if were to do so, (and especially having carefully read the contract that Amazon makes you sign to make your work available for the Kindle) I wouldn't be inclined to insert another profit-making entity between me and my readers.
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Attention. If I can look at and search for thousands of books in one place, I am more likely to notice your book if it is there.
One way to look at it is like this: how much are you currently making on the books that you are not selling that Amazon is not taking a share of?
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Attention. If I can look at and search for thousands of books in one place, I am more likely to notice your book if it is there.
The more you think about it, the less that actually makes sense. The more books that are there, the less likely you are to notice my specific book.
Having tried to find decent apps in Apple's App Store (especially free games), I know that eventually volume becomes more of a negative than a positive. I wind up searching the net for people's "top X list of free iphone games", etc. So in reality, what I'm looking for is a content portal with reviews and discussion groups done by area of interest that can the
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I'm probably missing something obvious, but I have yet to understand why we need to insert a middleman store into the chain between producer and consumer. It seems to me cheaper and more efficient for the publisher of a book (or the author himself) to provide downloads directly.
One benefit I can see is that it gives you a single place to go get books from. I don't have to remember the web sites for 100 authors, or 50 publishers. Instead, I can just remember a single site which aggregates all the books together. Sure, I'll end up paying a higher monetary cost due to the middleman, but presumably the time cost savings is enough to me that it is worthwhile.
It's sort like having an iPhone App Store instead of hundreds of independent software publishers to download from. Another benefi
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You need the publisher less than you need a retailer.
A publisher (mainly) provides publicity, editing, manufacturing, and, the only thing they are really good at, getting your dead tree into brick&mortars. You can contract editors, you can do publicity on the internet, and small run print options have almost reached parity with bigger presses. Most bookstores will even order PoD books now and some even take PoD returns on the theory that if you were interested enough to order it at a store, someone el
baen has no drm (Score:5, Informative)
i can see it now (Score:4, Insightful)
along the right side of each page in the ebook.... yep "ads by google" :D
No Kindle outside the US (Score:5, Insightful)
The original article seem to focus entirely on a Amazon vs Google battle. But in that article is missing one point: Kindle is not available outside the US. That is: you need an USA registered Credit Card with a USA address to buy one. Yes there are work around - but why should I support a flawed business model.
So for me living outside the US I had to look else where for for eBooks. And if you do you will soon notice that there are better eBook reader then Kindle and that there are better eBook shops then Amazon. Amazon is largely capitalising there good name here. In fact currently it is more like Amazon vs the rest of the world.
For me there is no doubt who is going to win in the long run. While USA is a large marked but it does only represent 5% of human population. Well, unless Amazon changes there business model that is.
Re:This is like... (Score:4, Interesting)
Unless Google teams their ebooks with Apple on a new tablet.
Then, watch out Amazon.
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Then, watch out Amazon.
TBH, iPhone app + no DRM = curtains. Definitely.
Re:This is like... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep. I never used iTunes because it didn't run on my OS, and it had DRM (light DRM, but DRM nevertheless). The first time I ever bought music online was from Amazon, and now I'm buying all my music on Amazon. All Amazon had to do to get my business was to offer me the opportunity to pay my money in return for an mp3 file, which nobody else was willing to let me do.
The Kindle is exactly analogous. It has a proprietary format, with DRM. Google says they want to have a format that works on a variety of devices, which presumably means no DRM. If they execute the idea well, I'll probably buy my first electronic book from Google.
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Re:This is like... (Score:4, Insightful)
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I was right at the part of my e-novel where it said: "And the killer's name was....(Low Battery) Unfortunately, I was sitting on the commode, and could not reach the AC adapter. :(
So that's what the kids are calling it nowadays? ;)
Re:Not too happy with my Kindle (Score:5, Funny)
[SPOILER ALERT]
The killer's name really was Low Battery.
Low had tried to frame his brother the rapper, 9V. But the power required to electrocute the victim was too high -- and 9V demonstrated he had full charge by having the detective place both his contacts on his tongue. While 9V lost a lot of street cred for getting tongued by a male detective, it did show that he was fully-charged and quite innocent.
So then Low Battery tried to frame his sister, Anita Agatha Battery, but AA Battery simply didn't have the brute power necessary for the job.
Out of blood relatives (and it had to be one of the siblings, as established by DC-NA testing), by process of elimination, it was Low Battery who depleted his power by committing the electrocution, with terminal results.
So sorry. That last pun was just over the top.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Always the same back and forth on this topic every time eBooks are mentioned.
Someone says smartphones/PDAs are better, then someone else (like me) responds that the benefit of an eInk display is:
1) There is no backlight, which helps alleviate eyestrain during long reading sessions.
2) There is no screen refresh, so you can read for a very long time without killing your battery.
Having read extensively on a homebrew-enabled PSP with a LCD screen and now on a Sony PRS-700, I know that the LCD screen does hurt m
PDF is a print format (Score:5, Informative)
PDF is a terrible format for ebooks. It's designed to instruct a printer how to draw on paper of a specifc, fixed size. An ebook format needs to deal with different screen sizes (possibly wildly different - I read ebooks on my 1280x800 laptop screen and my 177x220 phone screen) and different text sizes (my long-sighted father is going to want larger text in his ebooks than I do). PDF doesn't allow for the kind of reflow that a good ebook reader is going to employ.
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ePub is already there. (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, ePub can technically already do typesetting,