Slashdot Mirror
On the Economics of the Kindle
perlow writes "Just how many books a year would you need to read before the cost of Amazon's Kindle is justified? The answer is not so cut-and-dried. If you're a college student and all of your texts were available on Kindle (possible but unlikely), you could recover the cost of the reader in a semester and a half. For consumers to break even with Kindle's cost in that time, they would have to be in the habit of buying and reading four new hardback books per month — if the convenience factor wasn't part of the equation. At two books per month, breakeven would be in three years." Here is the spreadsheet if you want to play with the numbers.
but I want something with a color screen at least (i know its too much to ask but oh well)
...if the convenience factor wasn't part of the equation.
Isn't this largely the point? Who the hell is making a decision to purchase this based on book cost?
Some of us actually enjoy having a real library at home, turning through pages and even collecting real books. There is nothing better than going in the library, firing up a premium cigar or my pipe and doing either some actual real book work-reading of leisurely reading.
The kindle cannot replace that experience, at least not for me. So it's not always about money.
I'll stick to books - they have one really big advantage - they are not electronic and give my eyes a rest from a bloody screen - I work on computers all day and spend a fair bit of my spare time in front of one at home - so I like to read to unwind before bed.
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
The convenience factor is the equation. The whole equation.
I just got back from vacation and guess what...I FINALLY saw a Kindle in the wild at the airport. I just don't see this thing taking off. The iPhone or something similar has a much greater chance of making it big as an e-book reader. At least with a cell phone you can justify the cost because you can use it for more than just reading books.
I don't see how basic division is a story. But whatever.
It's clearly not designed for students, because it doesn't have what a text-book replacement machine would have.
It's a very nice recreational book reader -- easy to carry, easy to turn pages, easy to store. Certainly a lot easier than a library or bookshelf in your home.
That said, it's still too expensive for me -- I don't read much, but even if I did, it's just too much to spend on a hobby. At $100, just reading ascii text files, I'd buy it on a moment's notice. At $150, I'll take PDF and images. Beyond that, I'm simply not interested in spending money on reading. There are better things.
In fact. Ebay is a great source of books, and once read, it's a great way to get rid of them. The same for CDs and DVDs.
Deleted
All the books you can read on the Kindle, you can read with a book reader sitting at your computer for essentially the same price. If convenience isn't part of the equation, the Kindle will never pay for itself. (assuming you already have to have a computer to interface with the Kindle)
That said, I have a non-kindle but similar book reader, and feel it is more than worth it. Half the reason that the Baen Free Library increases sales of the books in it is that people don't want to sit at their computer to read books. Having hundreds of books (currently have 264 books on my book reader) in the palm of your hand, in a consistent size (no hardbacks you can't stick in your pocket) and readable anywhere with a 2 week battery life is just hard to beat.
My verdict is that the kikle is greedy with the color and generally untrustworthy.
the thing I carry around all the time with me, despite my cellphone, is my EeePC. So, while not as nice as the Kindle, my solution is
EeePC + FBReader/PDF reader + eeerotate = instant ebook reader
Since I already use the computer for other things, my "Eeebook" costs me zilch and I don't have to lug around yet another device that I have to charge with yet another charger, etc...
In a couple of years, you will be able to buy one for less than $50.
Next up a spreadsheet detailing the break-even point of your iPhone one 25 cent pay phone call at at time!
I didn't buy a Kindle to save money. The fact that books are cheaper help make it easier to make the decision to buy the Kindle, but.. the primary reason I bought it was convenience. Anywhere I go, I have a library of books to read; they remember where in the book I am (no dropping the book); the font size is variable (my late night reading font is bigger than mid-day); and lastly, the built in modem.
Sure, I can carry a dead tree book or two at the most, but they start to get annoying to have anything more than that. And, late night, reading dead trees is hard on my eyes.
Good, Fast, Cheap - Pick any two. - RFC 1925
So you take a nice, analog book, that you can throw in a backpack, and replace it with an expensive, oh-God-dont-scratch-the-screen, keep-the-thing-charged, single-purpose PDA ? Um, no thanks.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
As I have argued ad nauseam here (PDF) and elsewhere, Ebook readers sinply won't take off big-time until the manufacturers forget their proprietary formats and go for something sensible.
Unfortunately, "something sensible" doesn't mean some HTML bodge, RTF kludge, or non-reprocessable binary like PDF, but a persistent, parsable, non-proprietary, standard. Gosh, isn't that what XML was supposed to do?
I am surprised nobody has mentioned newspapers and such. I have looked at a Kindle so I can get my subscriptions in a timely fashion without worrying about the weather, travel, and the such. And honestly, I am not that worryied about DRM and lock in issues for yesterday's paper. Doing the math in my head I think my break even point would be something under 18 months.
As an engineering student, I think this idea is impractical. When I'm preparing for a midterm, I'm usually burning through practice problems at the end of each chapter. The ability to glance at the last few pages of the book (physically) to check my answer, or to flip back a few pages to reread a concept is invaluable. I'm sure I would get annoyed rather quickly with the electronic equivalent.
Now on the other, for light reading. I can see how it's practical.
I would never replace my textbooks with it.
The advantage e-books have over dead-tree versions is in technical material. Shop manuals, technical schematics, medical journals, etc. Any material where being able to 'search' would be a benefit. E-books offer almost 0 benefit for casual or 'entertainment' reading. But that isn't the point. Source material longevity is the key. A good quality hardcover can last HUNDREDS of years! Try that with any electronic device or file-system. I remember a time not too long ago when 16 registers on a CPU were a big deal, and DOS apps couldn't read Mac files (even the 'simple' ASCII txt files) and there were different file-system structures 7bit vs 8bit vs *. We think that .txt is the safest solution for portability and longevity but IBM used to think the same thing about punch-cards!
If you are going to invest enough money in a Kindle to make it a 'worthy' purchase, then you are that-much-more going to benefit 50 years from now with your library of real-books and a pair of eyeballs as your interface to them.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Sure, you can get sunlight readable color screens but they chew power and are costly.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Amazon should've made the Kindle into a loss-leader much like video game consoles. This strategy would bring down the price of the Kindle so its accessible to everyone. Also they should really ditch DRM support. Books are meant to be shared.
I think the margins might fill up a little too quickly...
With a real hardback book I can resell it on amazon for most of what I paid for it. Moreover I can buy it used to begin with. So the cost estimates here are off by a factor of 8 to 10 at least. Of course here is some inconvenience i reselling. On the other hand I can also buy a lot more books at one time for the same price and keep them till I'm ready to read. Conveience to me is being able to toss a book in my airplane bag or beach bag. I'm not taking my kindle to the pool or the beach. I'm not going to leave it outside on the patio table while I go take a pee or refill my drink. And I'm certainly not parking it beside the piss pot, or taking it in the bathtub with me. Besides, being old school, I find there's a great deal of visceral nature to books that somehow is part of the reading. Even being able to dog ear a page or write in the margins of certain kinds of books is a very good way to use them effectively. Not to mention...convenient.
His analysis of the kindle as a vehicle for college textbooks doesn't work.
Most students buy their books used and sell most of them back to the bookstore at the end of the semester. If publishers started offering textbooks for the kindle, they'd presumably be DRM'd, and you wouldn't be able to sell them back. The publishers hate the used textbook market, and they do anything they can to kill it off (e.g., a new edition of a calculus textbook every 2-3 years), so there's no question in my mind that they'd use DRM to eliminate it.
Most lower-division textbooks in most subjects are in a large, color format with a layout so complex that it makes every page look like the cockpit of a 747. This doesn't work on the kindle.
He seems to assume that the cost of a college textbook mainly has to do with paper, printing, and binding (ppb), so that it would be much cheaper in electronic form. Actually, ppb is no more than a small fraction of the cost of most textbooks.
He seems to assume that the only way to read an electronic book is on a special e-book reader, and then he goes on to calculate how long it would take to earn back the high cost of a kindle. But nearly all college students either have a laptop or a desktop machine, so the only logical reason for them to buy a kindle would be the same as for anyone else: convenience.
Find free books.
Oh cute an ".ods" file. Oh no, it is an .xls file.
What about those of us that use it to read *free* materials? ( be them truly free or "ip infringed" )
In my case its 100% convenience, though you can factor in the eliminated need to print them so i'm not tied to my desktop.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's consider that a much more interesting topic.
The idea of giving free cellular data service away with a device is basically the exact opposite of what the rest of the industry does.
You can get an iPhone for $200, but then you're obligated to pay ~10x that amount for wireless service over the next couple of years. A Kindle costs $350 and has free wireless for how long? forever?
Can that business model really be profitable in the long term? If so, I'd say it's a great deal for the consumer. But I have to wonder how many people have to do a bit of web browsing on their Kindle before Amazon starts losing money on wireless bills, and decides to remove features or connectivity?
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
What this seems to completely forget is the fact that you still have a BOOK after you're done reading paper. This is good for trading in or passing on to others who will take the class.
Kindle's wireless deliveries only work inside the USA. Likewise you can't buy content without a US credit card.
This rules out a large chunk of their potential customers, and one of the huge benefits of buying a Kindle. It also means many overseas book sellers won't want their content used on Kindles.
My mother (in Australia) wanted to get one, largely because she can adjust the text on the screen. Here eyes are not what they used to be and she gets stronger and stronger prescriptions on her glasses.
It is the lack of access and the cost that are the biggest obstacles for her. To me is seems the Kindle is an American-only club that provides a good ebook reader at high cost.
Those at Amazon really need to broaden their perspective if this is to take off.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
My textbooks are expensive. Some are a third of the price of the Kindle, so I guess I could recover the cost pretty quickly. That said, I really like my hardback textbooks. They just "click" with my brain somewhat better than if they were in electronic format.
On the other hand, I often wish I could have all my textbooks in electronic format so I can search for a certain thing quickly, and then read the relevant stuff from the book. That would be the best of both worlds.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I bought a Sony PRS505 about a year ago and haven't paid a penny for books since, the thing paid itself off months ago when it comes to new release hardcover titles.
Like mp3's and the iPod, piracy will drive sales of this thing - especially with college textbooks.
OTOH, how many books are worth your time reselling? Textbooks for one if the next class uses them. But most computer books (outside Knuth's or Kernighan & Ritchies of the world) become obsolete really fast. Many Novels get bundled by my local farmer's market for a $1-3 a piece. And are you really going to resell a book on half.com or amazon for $9 or less and go to the bother of going to the post office to ship it and what not? It's not worth it for the time alone.
Convenience: Some book collections are worth good money. One of my friend is an antique dealer and his 1000s reference guides alone from the 1910s to the 1990s are all out of print and would bring money to the right collectors of their niche. But he uses them for work and because he's rather disorganized, they all randomly take up 3 rooms piled here and there and on book cases. If he had them scanned in on a computer, at least, he could at least look through his collection by keywords instead of spending hours flipping through books because he remembers taking a glimpse of some relevant item here or there years back. Which he often wastes a Saturday doing when he would rather be doing other things.
Your point about the physical nature of a book is valid, but I suspect generational. It's the same lament of those who like vinyl records vs CDs or now mp3s. There are definite up and downsides to both mediums, real and perceived, but the next generation will be more easy to take up the next big thing.
Am I at the right website? Has my DNS been hijacked? I mean, my browser's location bar shows "slashdot.org" as the domain, but...
...where the hell is the suspicion that the FBI is plugged right in to the database for these things back at Amazon HQ?
... there have to be a few of the strong-opinioned variety of you left! Come forward and tell me that you absolutely, unequivocally believe that there's no way, no chance, no how that the government of the United States of America hasn't plugged itself into the back-end of these things, and that they aren't engaged in data mining for "suspected terrorists" by monitoring every download you make with the Kindle. It would be such easy pickings, such low-hanging fruit! There it all is, in one nice location, in a nice corporate-maintained database! Sweet! You want to tell me the FBI is passing up on that juicy little store of information?
For the first time in my Slashdot-reading life, I'm actually disappointed that there isn't more skepticism and hostile commentary being generated here! Every time the Kindle is brought up, all I see is some weak commentary. What the hell happened to the outrage over Section 215 of the Patriot Act that was so abundant a few years back?
From the link I just gave: "Would you know if Section 215 had been used on you? Nope. The person made to turn over the records is gagged and cannot disclose the search to anyone."
Has everyone succumbed to Patriot Act Fatigue or something?
The Patriot Act is still out there, and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!
Come on Slashdot readers
Really?
Personally I believe anyone who wants a Kindle is a fool. If I were going to buy an e-book reader (and I'm not), I'd actually consider the freaking Sony model first, which is far more offline (i.e. not reliant on communication with a mothership, unlike the Kindle). Yes, Sony! Ain't that amazing!?
I have an excellent library only a couple of miles from my house, giving me access to the latest hardcovers for only $10 per year (plus municipal taxes). It's the best deal going. I occasionally have to wait a few weeks for the titles I need, but it's far more sensible than squandering money on DRM encumbered "copies" that I can't easily share with my wife, lend to a friend or resell.
You can't surf on the web, you can only buy books on it from Amazon's store.
Convenience is the name of the game for the Kindle. Always having the newest magazines and newspapers available at the tip of your fingers is an amazing feature for commuters. Instead of bringing a book, Newsweek, and the New York Times, you can bring your Kindle. Did you read a favorable book review? Well, download the book! Instant gratification. I also read two or three books at a time. One tends to be intellectual and the others are pop trash. Instead of choosing which books to take, I can just bring them all with me on the Kindle and read whatever I want on the five hour long train ride from New York to Boston.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Of course, the author used hardcover instead of paperback pricing for books. If I'm buying a hardcover of a book, it's because I want to put the book on the shelf.
Otherwise, I'm buying a paperback, which is typically cheaper than the equivalent Kindle price.
If you have a good used book store around, I guarantee you will get more than the difference in cost back.
I poked around on Amazon, and found that when you look at mass market paperbacks, Kindle books are often the same price, and even when cheaper, the difference is pretty minimal.
I'm one of those folks who read a LOT, 3-6 books a week is not that unusual. However, I probably only one hardcover book every other year or so. So for me, an ebook would never pay for itself, If I bought one, it would be entirely for the convenience factor, and as of yet, I don't even find them that convenient. Mass market paperbacks are still smaller, lighter, and a lot less prone to damage.
I went to eBay and picked up a used Dell Axim from 2003. $75. I added a hard case and a new battery for an extra $40. The battery lasts for a full week and a half of reading. Then I bought the μBook reader for $15. I went over to Manybooks.net, looked through the reviews, and downloaded a bunch of ebooks to read. I put the unused SD card from my camera in the PDA, and now I've got a gigantic reading library, with 8-directional game pad for Nintendo emulation, MP3 player, Japanese word processor/dictionary, etc.
When I go to my public library, I use the PDA's Wi-fi to surf the web and look at book reviews for anything in paper form that I might want to check out or reserve.
No, the Kindle would not be cost-effective for me. With the extra ~$245 I saved, I bought a Wacom tablet and some programming books.
Some of us have more than one hobby and don't like supporting a single, simple hobby like reading with chunks of $400 or more.
Systematically buying everything you read new and hardcover is pretty uncommon anyways, except maybe for people who have amounts of disposable income that make the convenience factor the only that counts anyway.
Reading paperback, pocket-book and other discounted editions, buying used books on peer-to-peer marketplaces, borrowing from a library, from a friend, your spouse, of from your parent's bookshelf, all these are not taken into account. If we divide that value of each book that I've read in my life, by the total number of people who've read that particular physical book too, and take the average, we're most definitely in the sub-$1 area, even counting all of the technical and textbook stuff.
When you lose it, drop it, or otherwise break it, you're screwed. Look at how many people lose their cell phones | drop them in the toilet | can't remember where they left them ...
If I somehow lose or destroy a $5 paperback, I'm out $5. How many would I have to lose before I reach the cost of 1 kindle?
Plus books look good on a shelf. I can find the exact book I'm looking for in seconds, and most of the time, with reference manuals, the exact page quickly enough - most reference books come with something called an "index" They even come with a meta-index - though they call it a "table of contents", so the whole "I can search it" is moot. Now, does it blend?
The segway didn't change transportation. Neither will the kindle change my reading habits. And it's a stupid name, to boot. "Kindle" - you can't even burn it
Something I don't like about the Kindle is the drying up of the used books market that it represents. In a very similar vein I like to be able to loan my books out. My sons enjoy reading the same sorts of books I do. Sometimes my wife wants to read a book I got. Or my daughter. Or my brother might. I read a good book and then they want to. With the Kindle they've got to buy it separately and then we've got three copies of the same book kicking around the house and worse yet we have to have five kindles in the household. No thanks.
isn't the price of the Kindle. But the price of the tech books that are still ridiculously high. They should be cheaper since they're not in print. Not $50+ per book.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
It's not just about selling. Most of the value in culture is sharing. If I have a real physical book, I can lend it to my friend. I can give it to a family member. I can say "read this; I loved it". If it's locked into my Kindle then that's much less likely to happen. That may not happen with every book, but you don't know which ones are going to be important till you read them.
A real book is worth much more than a DRM controlled image of one.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
The Kindle is something that neither of us would have bought for ourselves, but I know that my wife really wanted an ebook reader, so I gave one to her as a birthday gift. The good thing about gifts is that it doesn't have to make economic sense, the point is to bring joy to the gift recipient. When thinking about it, I thought that I could have bought her 20 - 30 books for what the kindle cost me, but it didn't take me long to realize that that wasn't the point.
http://cryptojoe.blogspot.com
If you think you're going to get more than $10 for a used book that cost $20 new, you're sadly mistaken. I can go to the used book store and buy the books for a third or less of the cover price, so why would I pay you more than half?
Only for out-of-print hard to find copies can you even dream about getting most of what you paid.
Also keep in mind that there are e-book vendors out there that sell unprotected books, and you can re-sell them as per the first sale right. I probably have around 30 or so unprotected e-books which I have bought.
But the big plus of e-book readers is the convenience. 300 books on a small card weighs a hell of a lot less than three full bookcases, and you never forget where a book is either. It's always with you.
The main benefit for me is backlight, which allows me to read in bed without waking the wife or using strange and cumbersome contraptions. This is why I currently read on a PDA, and the Kindle isn't an option. The new Sony of this year, though, has a built-in light, so I'm considering it. Yeah, it comes with DRM, but it doesn't force you to use DRM.
(And I refuse to judge it negatively for being a Sony -- both people and companies deserve to be punished for crimes they actually do, and not crimes they have done before. The erroneous belief "once a criminal, always a criminal" belongs under a rock in Texas, where it was discovered.)
Most of that wireless is paid for by the very same customer who is using the kindle... I have wireless, I am my own provider... it just doesnt go much further than my house. Suits me fine.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
That's true, but how much would it cost you to print out the Gutenberg archives on something suitable for dog-earing. eBook readers are the devices that finally realise the value of that project.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The Kindle uses Sprint's cell network, not the wifi network you have set up in your house. Amazon foots the bill for each byte you use over the network and (presumably) makes it back out of the large profit margin of a book sale.
The Washington Post, delivered to my door: $40/mo, and often soggy, late, or just plain missing.
The Washington Post, delivered to my Kindle: $10/mo, never late, no ads, and no crawling under the car to get it. No ink all over my fingers either. Searchable.
$359 Kindle cost / $30 savings per month = 12 months to pay itself off.
That's assuming you buy nothing except that one newspaper.
that even shows images.
It'd be interesting to throw the cost of bookshelves and space requirements for storage of paper books into the equation.
(i.e. not reliant on communication with a mothership, unlike the Kindle)
If you shut off the wireless connection (and you get like 5 times the battery life by doing so) you can still use the supplied USB cable to install whatever you want on a kindle without any connection to Amazon.
I use my Kindle to read multiple newspapers each morning, and I don't have to worry about being on the road and not being able to buy the paper I want.
Truly? heck that shows a great amount of forethought! on both Amazon and my part (for commenting on that which I had not researched :s ...)
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
all i know about my kindle:
1) i have so far been able to get all but 2 books i was looking for on it.
2) why, yes, i do read 5 or 6 books per month, at least (not all hardback, to be sure). this past month, i think i plowed through 12 or 13. of course, that may, in part, be due to the kindle being very convenient to lug around.
3) it sure is easier than lugging a couple books on every business trip i have to take.
4) it is a lot more comfortable than reading on a laptop, especially on a plane. and not nearly so battery hungry.
4a) it's easier to read almost anyplace (other than a desk) than a laptop, come to think of it.
5) it sucked when i was telling a guy who just discovered chuck klosterman that he should check out _downtown owl_, because it's a great book and i just finished re-reading it, and i'd loan/give it to him except that it's on my kindle.
6) i don't like there being a record of everything i read on my kindle out there for amazon/_insert random government agency_/etc. to see, but frankly it's not nearly as embarassing/suspicious as the things i look at on my web browser, and i figure someone at my isp is currently being treated to hookers/blow/[hookers & blow] by the nsa in exchange for turning over my browsing records, anyway. i have no illusions of privacy.
the thing has pros and cons like any other media format. but the last time i moved, i had a truckload of books. literally. a one-ton pickup truck full of books. the idea of being able to read what i want (whenever i want) without acquiring another truckload of physical book-objects is worth the downside to me. and thus i got this kindle. and i like it so far.
drm considerations aside (a bit bothered by them, to be sure), i recommend for folks who read a lot or are very sensitive to weight/size considerations when travelling. and, of course, try to check one out first to make sure you can comfortably read on it...
for me, economics didn't play too much of an issue, it was more about the device itself. plus, much like corn ethanol, i see this as a needed step to get between a crappy, inefficient old process to a new, cool one. and i guess if kindle 1.0 is an intermediate step on that journey, as someone who like to read (lots) i am happy to support, etc...
there are some small design issues with the kindle, but overall i find it about as comfortable as reading a paper book. and that's good enough for me.
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I will buy books in electronic format as long as they are considerably cheaper than the paperback alternative (including s&h) and I can read them on my computer without having to buy either expensive hardware like the Kindle, or specialised proprietary software. So I want books costing $5 to $6 in HTML , PDF or other standard format. Baen books does that, I wish more publishers did.
Sure a portable reader is more convenient, but in my case I don't have as much need for it. I walk to work, so reading on public transport is not an issue, and I personally don't read while sitting on the toilet. My day job is only part time, so I only have a lunch break one day a week. My full time job is a night shift that doesn't officially have a meal break, and during the downtimes between rounds we are likely to be interrupted by call-lights, so reading a novel is not easy. magazines are ok.
I read about three books a month. I'm still one of those guys that prefers having the actual pages in my hand, though (there's something about the tactile feel of a book-not too mention the smell and pleasantness of heft). That said, I read a lot in bed or reclining on a couch. Books get heavy (take anything by Neal Stephenson, for example). I'd love to be able to read a Kindle in the dark, while in bed. I'd buy one in a heartbeat if this were possible (but my understanding is the screen requires ambient light). I wouldn't be worried about taking a couple years to recoup cost; the convenience of not having to travel to the bookstore and being able to carry multiple books (without all the weight) would justify any additional expense, in my mind.
Granted that the motivation for ebooks will be different for different people but at this point the economics doesn't really make sense. The issue for many of us is convenience and access to material. The ability to have near instant access to a variety of new reading materials (books, magazines, newspapers) at my fingertips no matter where I am AND in a small and easy to use form factor is the driving factor. I make 2-3 cross-country round trips monthly by air. The ability to access newspapers, magazines, and new books just before getting on the plane and always have them in the same form factor is very convenient. At home, the ability to carry the unit and access the magazines and newspapers whenever I have a few free minutes is also very valuable. I just wish there were more newspaper and magazine content available for it. (By the way, I see at least one other person with a Kindle or other ebook on just about every flight sitting near me so I know there are a lot more out there).
Why does the guy put "SUM()" around all of his math in the formulas?
Did this use to be a requirement for some old spreadsheet software? This is the second time I've seen someone do this and it baffles me. The first I assumed was because the person was an idiot, but I'm unwilling to assume that is the same here.
EG:
=Sum(D78*5)
=Sum(C77-D77)
Why? Instead of just =C77-D77 or =Product(D78,5).
It's the subtractions that really get me.
My research shows that it will take you 10 YEARS before your big screen TV, Blu-Disc player, and surround sound system will pay for itself, versus going to see a movie in the theater. Plus, we all know the theater is better because it has that nice popcorn smell. I will upload a spreadsheet if you aren't convinced...
and have yet to see a sale. this is sad considering you can buy the book for under 5.00. i thought the whole kindle publishing metaphor could easily create a new path to publication for writers who can't get published because the economy is keeping the standard path to publishing open to new (and not-so-new) writers. the problem is that amazon doesn't do much for PR for new writers for the kindle. they could easily market new writers and have an entirely new revenue stream based on writers you can not read anywhere else (at least until they are established). anyway - if you're curious - the book is called Shero. it's a super hero book.
nature loves variety::society hates it get your variety at http://www.monkeypantz.net
25 years ago Borland came out with Turbo Pascal with its famous "Book License" and the nearly unheard of release-with-no-copy-protection. Treat the disk/program like a book: Give it away, throw it away, whatever. Just be sure though, like a book, it could not possibly be in use in two places at the same time.
Quite a 'novel' idea for software and for consumer property rights.
Perhaps it will take a bit of time for the Kindle to catch up to books in terms of bang for the buck, but what about trees? Think about how many trees could be saved each year if everyone used the Kindle! Our carbon footprints would be significantly reduced. On the other hand, it would exacerbate the scarcity of some metals.
Things have changed. When IBM was making punchcards, how many computers were there in the world? Let's be generous and say a couple hundred thousand. To compare, there are over 13 million iPhones in the world alone, to say nothing of Macs, PCs, or any of the other gazillion devices that can all read Unicode text. Certain digital formats are too big to ever really die, and Unicode is one of them. Similarly, JPEGs will never die. Why? Because people will always want to open pictures, and as long as we have software that can open pictures, it's trivial to make it so that it can open grandma's old family JPEGs in addition to whatever the standard format of 2050 is.
Now, hardware specs *can* die. For example, Apple is phasing out Firewire 400 right now. We can imagine in 10 years, maybe USB will be replaced by something wireless. But digital file formats are always going to be forward compatible, since it's trivial to make sure you can convert them to the new format. I can't use my mouse from 1995, but I can open a Word file in Office 95 format with TextEdit.
So, the key to keeping your data forever is pretty simple: Make multiple copies of it and store them in physically different locations (to prevent lost by disaster), and every couple years take a couple hours out to copy it onto a new physical device (to prevent loss by bit rot or physical format changes).
"Dirty rotten companies shove mp3-camera-gameboy-dildo-phones down our throats every minute of every day. "
I would like to subscribe to your color E-newsletter with stereo screaming and moaning.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
The reason real ink uses a subtractive color model is because it prints onto a white medium. If you literally had some e-ink that got printed and then removed, that would also be the case.
However, the e-ink systems really just select among a fixed set of available reflectors. They don't add nor subtract from a medium. So the reality is that you could have many different sorts of computed color spaces and you would finally have to map them into this smaller indexed color space, potentially with dithering.
You could imagine a very ordered set of reflectors in RGB, CMYK, or possibly even HSV arrays. Or you could have something much more randomized like film grain, and then a more computationally expensive process to map the desired image field onto this noise field with the best dithering effect possible. (Think noise shaping.)
"5) it sucked when i was telling a guy who just discovered chuck klosterman that he should check out _downtown owl_, because it's a great book and i just finished re-reading it, and i'd loan/give it to him except that it's on my kindle."
Maybe Steam for books.
"6) i don't like there being a record of everything i read on my kindle out there for amazon/_insert random government agency_/etc. to see, but frankly it's not nearly as embarassing/suspicious as the things i look at on my web browser, and i figure someone at my isp is currently being treated to hookers/blow/[hookers & blow] by the nsa in exchange for turning over my browsing records, anyway. i have no illusions of privacy."
Hows that any different than buying hardcover? Unless of course you pay for everything with cash.
"the thing has pros and cons like any other media format. but the last time i moved, i had a truckload of books. literally. a one-ton pickup truck full of books. the idea of being able to read what i want (whenever i want) without acquiring another truckload of physical book-objects is worth the downside to me. and thus i got this kindle. and i like it so far."
As the person who brought to the attention about the last E-reader. This was part of my reason. The other is basically I "lost (no longer have available)" all those books and have to start back at square one and rebuild. It also impacted in other ways. The weight and space had to be taken into consideration were I lived. I couldn't be as mobile as I wanted because I knew the books would have to come along. I love reading and wouldn't give up reading but for it's pluses it also has downsides. So now I wait for the technology to mature.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
"Most students buy their books used and sell most of them back to the bookstore at the end of the semester. If publishers started offering textbooks for the kindle, they'd presumably be DRM'd, and you wouldn't be able to sell them back. The publishers hate the used textbook market, and they do anything they can to kill it off (e.g., a new edition of a calculus textbook every 2-3 years), so there's no question in my mind that they'd use DRM to eliminate it. "
Or instead of being conditioned to think the traditional way. How about you buy an E-book reader (it really doesn't need the Kindles bells an whistles) loaded with all the material you'll need for your course of study* and sell THAT back at the end? This would address your complaints.
*All of it with progressive unlocking as you progress in your studies. No longer do you have to run back to the bookstore to get new books.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
> you could recover the cost of the reader in a semester and a half.
That's not because of the Kindle, that's because of the racket the publishers have going on in the student textbook business.
That's why textbooks cost so much, because you don't have the option to get them someplace like the Kindle. In other words, don't expect very many textbooks to be available on the Kindle anytime soon.
As far as examples go, that one's really poor.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
... convert my library to Kindle Format?
I own 600 books at last count. I read them all (well, ok, except for the Star Trek ones... they're *cough* boxed up in the basement). So how much would it cost me to covert the library to kindle format? At the prices I've seen on amazon... a couple of grand.
No can do. There's just no cost benefit unless you're going to give me the content I already own for free.
Most of the wireless Amazon is giving away is directly tied to the sales they make... I don't think they would price the books so low that they couldn't afford to transmit them. I don't think you can actually browse the web with it (correct me if I'm wrong); you can download books, get your magazine or newspaper delivered, and read blogs, but updating your RSS feeds for free isn't going to take a huge amount of bandwidth.
a) I haven't read a book from cover to cover in years
b) magazines that are a month old are too out of date - so I don't bother with print versions
c) millions of articles exist online for free just a yahoo search away
d) I have enough gadgets that "almost" do what I want. Why do I need another?
e) eBooks that aren't $0.99 each are simply too expensive with or without the free GSM/EDGE connection
f) like others have pointed out, DRM sucks. Just embed the credit card number and name into the file, which will prevent most of us from sharing it outside our households, right?
g) provide assurances that once content is bought, 100 years later, I can download it again, in a current format, for free AND/OR sell my rights to another "just like a book."
h) Merge these devices into the eBook reader: radio, mp3/mp4 media player, cell phone, blackberry, gps - basically, I need a device that's good enough to replace all these. Please, please use bluetooth connections for audio and keyboards so we can leave the larger sized device in a bag nearby.
i) USB charger - no proprietary chargers
j) light weight - under 2 lbs
k) memory expansion (64GB SD card support with 2 external access ports); USB storage connection too (disk, whatever)
l) long battery life - 8 hrs of video playback; 24 hrs of audio; a week of ebook page flipping every 20 secs.
Ok, so everything is currently possible with existing devices except their screens are too small. My Nokia N800 does most of this today. Bluetooth pair it with a cheap cell phone and a GPS receiver - fantastic.
This article misses the point of the Kindle. It doesn't exist to save the consumer's money -- not in this version and likely not in the next, either. The early adopter pays for the getting to use technology first, and that comes at a price. A technology writer should know this. With a Kindle, I can buy a book or newspaper for free in moments and start reading right away, without visiting a bookstore or waiting for a physical shipment. That's worth something to me. How much is your time worth? A Kindle also gives you the convenience of having hundreds of texts in one place, with a device that lasts a long time without needing a charge. That, too, is worth something to me. How much is it worth it to you not to have to lug around bulky, heavy books? On my Kindle, I can also search, annotate, and change the text size to accommodate my vision needs, without putting on reading glasses or buying a large-format version. That's worth something to me. How much ... do you get the picture?
How many of the books in your library are actually still under copyright? You might be surprised at the quality and quantity of things to read on Project Gutenberg or Feedbooks, and the latter can be directly downloaded to a Kindle over the free wireless network. I was delighted to find the Harvard Classics (the six-foot shelf of books that an educated person is expected to read in his/her lifetime) in well-formatted text form on both sites. If I had any self-discipline whatsoever, that would be enough reading for me for a very long time.
Used textbooks can sometimes be resold--if you buy them used, you can break-even sometimes. Can you resell the Kindle editions? And I agree, with some few exceptions for text books having only B&W is unacceptable. Haven't checked, but what do you have if you lose your Kindle? It's a good idea, although it would be so easy to build that additional functionality into a small workslate for about the same cost--more functionality. And, of course, Kindle is fine in a city, but out here in the woods we don't get much wifi access of any sort.
A tablet PC with an improved screen could do the same thing it does. It's just another DRM'd special purpose device, isn't it? What kind of Oprah Kool-Aid would I have to drink to want a Kindle? Oh, and not that it matters, but who picked the name for this thing? Why do I think of Fahrenheit 451 every time I hear about it?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'll admit that I'm biased since I'm trying to thin my personal library to only those books I really want to have around. Everything else is now a library read.
Given that and the fact that I would only buy used books at all I can't see where there's any convenience for someone like me. Set up a virtual store like half.com or something where people can buy and sell their Kindle versions and then maybe it might catch on. But the current incarnation has no value to me and those of my ilk.
The wireless thing? Sorry, I don't need to be connected 24 x 7 x 365. I like being away from all that nonsense. Typically when I sit down to read a good book. Ironic, isn't it?
No matter how good eInk technology is right now I don't see a really valid use of this. Textbook companies aren't going to do anything to endanger their locked-in revenue streams and publishers aren't going to let you resell the electronic versions. Heck, they've tried to keep people from reselling the dead tree versions at various times.
Another gadget for the gadget addicted.
Figure maybe $1.50 a year in late fines....it is going to take a looooong time for it to pay for itself.
If they started to offer books on loan for the kindle, for around $1 a week per book; then things start to get interesting. Of course this would significantly dent all of their profits so it won't happen.
When we already have handheld devices (phones, iPods, Blackberries, Palms, Pocket Windows) and cheap notebooks (Asus eee, XO, thousands of Wintel laptops?)
All of these devices can display ebooks -- and already are, and have been for YEARS.
My Tungsten E might be old and a little power-hungry, but I read ebooks on it all the time. Heck, even the trendy but otherwise pointless iPod has now morphed into a real PDA. Took Apple long enough, but they finally reinvented the Newton.
Amazon is way late to the party with a device which does nothing else useful. I just don't get it. These single-purpose dedicated devices are a waste of time, space, and money.
How come people like the New York Times still haven't figured out that e-*books* have long since arrived, but ebook *readers* are a technological dead end?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
What gave you the idea that XML was meant for text layout? Before it became a buzzword, the most common proposed purpose for XML was data interchange between old/propriety systems.
You took the first systems data, turned it to XML, and the second system had a parser that turned the XML into its format). The advantage of this was that you didn't have to modify either of the two systems, you just wrote the XML generators/interpreters.
There are dozens of formats for text layout, some suitable for academic work, so why would you advocate the re-creation of them in XML? XML isn't magic glue that needs to be incorporated in every data format.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
nature to books that somehow is part of the reading. Even being able to dog ear a page or write in the margins of certain kinds of books is a very good way to use them effectively. Not to mention...convenient.
For what it's worth, you can fold the corner of pages to mark places and take notes and make clippings of particular pages on a Kindle. You've never used one, apparently. :-)
You can't surf on the web, you can only buy books on it from Amazon's store.
Try the "experimental" menu, it has a web browser; it even has JavaScript to a limited extent, but works much better on pages meant for mobile usage of course. One of the reasons why I bought a Kindle was the free wireless, I can check on webmail and even /. (though I'm not reading /. via my Kindle right now :) ) without an expensive wireless plan or hopeing on an open wifi connection being available wherever I am.
Not if you travel, as I'm doing now, with my Kindle. I read fast, and back when I could check a 70 lb bag, it was common for me to bring 8 to 12 paperbacks on a 3 week trip. That weight adds up fast, and it doesn't take too many overweight or extra bag charges to make up for the cost of the Kindle. Not to mention the convenience of lightening the load, and the convenience of being able to easily carry a lot more than 8 to 10 books.
I have a Sony PRS-505 eBook reader, and I love it. I love the e-ink, I love having all my books in one place (and it saves lots of space - don't need huge bookshelves). I like being able to backup all my books. There are many advantages to eBooks. But I did not spend $250 on the eBook reader because i somehow managed to convince myself that since eBooks cost a few dollars less than traditional bound paper books I'd save myself money in the long run. Only an idiot would convince themselves that an eBook reader is a way to save money. It's not. You can always buy USED paper books (go to Half-Price Books or another used book store) cheaper than you can buy new-release eBooks. But that doesn't mean it's not a useful device. That being said, many copyrighted ebooks can be downloaded for free on bittorrent sites (not saying one should do this). In that case, it would save money assuming you would otherwise be purchasing the books in traditional format from Amazon or somewhere else. But don't kid yourself, buying eBooks for $14 instead of traditional paper books for $17 is not going to offset the cost of a $250-$300 electronic device anytime in your near future. Hopefully nobody is dumb enough to use frugality as a reason to drop a few hundred bucks on an Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader. People are dumb, but that's the level of stupidity at which people probably are not going to be doing a lot of reading, let alone book-buying in the first place. I love my Sony Reader, but it was a luxury that I paid for, and I have no illusions that it will be saving me money anytime in the near future.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
I figured everyone outside the US bought the "International Edition" at 1/5 the cost of the US edition. I can't imagine they are selling the International Editon at a loss. Why should the US edition cost $120 and the International edition cost $20? I wish I had been ballsy enough in college to just borrow everyone elses books. I know a couple of guys that made it a principle to not buy *any* books. They both graduated too.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Hi. Am I understanding correctly? You have to pay to use your library? $10/year isn't much, it's just that I hadn't ever heard of something like that before.
It's easier on a tablet PC. Battery life of laptops is not great compared to Kindle, but you have to give up something.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I buy a lot of books, but don't actually like hardbacks, because they're heavy and bulky, and it irritates me no end that for popular stuff the hardback is all that's available for the 6 months preceeding christmas. I wouldn't mind paying the hardback price for a paperbackr (well, not much anyway), but I just don't want to waste the shelf and pocket space that a hardback represents.
I don't have a kindle or whatever the sony device is called. I am not at college or any other educational establishment. But I like reading, and I end up in some odd places, and am away from home a lot of the time. So I use my phone. (HTC Trinity)
Ok, I can see the "screen too small" arguments already, but it does ok for me (320x240 or 60mm x 45mm). With font smoothing turned on, and the backlight set just as I like it, and using my preferred font at my preferred size (all these are fully adjustable), I can read just as well as I can a normal book. I'm only reading truly literary stuff, no diagrams, although things like the maps from LOTR display fine. I only need to gently touch the RH of the screen with my thumb to turn the page, and can annotate, bookmark, highlight and refer to a dictionary where necessary. I have hundreds of ebooks on an SD card, some bought and others from manybooks.net which has the gutenberg library available in all the main formats.
My phone fits in 1 hand, if I get a call it switches to that mode by itself and doesn't "lose" my place. In fact I can have several books on the go at once. As soon as I open any book, it returns to the page I was last on, I don't have to enable that or specifically bookmark anything. The kindle type devices apart from being too large (for my purposes) and being single purpose, have one major flaw when compared to real paper books. You can only have 1 book open at once. I'm not sure how it goes these days, but when I was at school, I would normally have at least 2 books open at once when doing any kind of research. Unless you buy two (or 3) kindles then you will never have that capability. Also, I don't think paper books are replaceable by electronics. The library would becomes a fairly empty souless place once that happened. Part of the appeal of a library to me, is being surrounded by millions of documents that contain the majority of the worlds knowledge and dreams. A couple of servers wouldn't have the same gravitas.
Viewing a single page of text is an unusual way of reading (for me anyway), and if I were to get a full size document reader, it would have to display 2 pages at once, just like a real book. But then it would likely not fit in my pocket, it wouldn't play games, mp3s or movie files, it wouldn't have GPS or 3G internet or a calculator, or stereo bluetooth, or SMS, or email. I would need SSH access to my servers, and be able to program my own software and be able to access just about all of the devices hardware with my own code. Maybe convergence is a bad thing for some, but I have all that in one device that fits comfortably in the palm of one hand. It cost a little more than the kindle, but I bought this device 2 years ago and if I were to have individual devices for music/movies and GPS, and reading and programming, then the individual costs would be prohibitive.
But that's just me, YMMV.
What does reading the books have to do with the financial analysis? Is the break even point different if you choose not to read the books? No.
For reading something interesting and fun it's PERFECT. I read about a book a week to every other week so I am pretty familiar with it. However when I read a book that I needed to bookmark and take notes in I ran into issues. One issue was that the other person I was reading with used a different font and when I'd try to ask opinions of things I'd find that the numbering system was inconsistent because of the font difference - that sucked! I couldn't say what did you think of the paragraph on page 55 like I could with a paper book. Frankly the numbering on the Kindle is a mystery to me. In the end she and I purchased paper copies for markup and notetaking. I had a great big pile of bookmarks on the Kindle but trying to highlight or markup was simply a PITA.
So, in that endeavor the Kindle failed us both. If I were in a classroom situation it would probably have been a similar situation with both of us unhappy. Arguments against eBooks in this situation are likely valid IMO.
However for reading normal stuff, books for pleasure, the Kindle is damned nice. The screen is SHARP and I can read it in any light that I'd be able to read another book. I can travel with 5-6 unread books without breaking my shoulder or stuffing a bag. I can carry 20-30 read books easily too. If I want a new book I can get one most anywhere and indeed I've done just that in an airport terminal a few times. I can download free books too which I've done. Converting PDF is also doable and I did it in at least one case where the publisher refused to produce an eBook but fans copied it (I own the paper copy).
Bottom line - I didn't buy a Kindle to somehow save money, that wasn't the point! It's nice that Amazon discounts Kindle books and all but I bought mine for the convenience. Being able to carry so many books so easily when I read so much was why I purchased the Kindle. If I never make up for it's cost in purchased books I do not care. The Kindle has allowed me to read far more than I was previously able and has made the process of picking out a book and getting it near instantaneous. I think these things make the Kindle a worthwhile investment that has nothing to do with saving money....
BTW I may be buying a Kindle for a young teen soon. My reasoning is that I want this child to be able to easily read and to improve their reading skills. I think the Kindle is perfect for this.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
you've yet to see an eInk display? When you find a tablet PC that can last 20 hours on a charge and charges FAST let me know. Never mind that the Kindle display rocks, the battery life alone stomps any laptop around. It's also lightweight with only the new Netbooks coming anywhere close in portability.
So no, it's not just a DRM'd laptop thingy.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Yea, I get the economics of ebook readers - but there are other things to consider as well. For example - I have a natural aversion to paper books. They feel weird on my fingers and I get uncomfortable reading them.
So if you measure an ebook reader's value based on how many more books it allows you to read, even if it's not anywhere close to four per month, then it becomes a lot more valuable.
or else!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You need to look at prices more closely then. The Kindle books are discounted off of the Amazon price usually by 2-3 dollars apiece. Saving 2-3 on a $9 book is hardly minimal IMO. I have yet to see a single Kindle book priced the same as the paperback counterpart and certainly never at the cover price. The highest price I've paid for a Kindle book is $9.99 and while I know some reference or technical books go higher they are still discounted and certainly not your "mass paperback" example.
I read "mass paperbacks" and right now my Kindle has about 20 of them on it to include the entire Harry Potter series (from PDF). You really think I could carry that as easily in paper form as I can on my Kindle?! Seems to me the Kindle is a far better way to transport books and when I finish one in an airline terminal I'm not forced to pay extortion level pricing for another from the local shop. If I've run out of reading on it I can easily have one delivered wirelessly in seconds.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
"...and has to deal with file formats, those barriers aren't going away..."
Couldn't we consider the book a type of format? All it is is a way of organizing information.
of a used textbook! When I was in school lo, these many years ago, I _always_ bought the most marked up books that I could find. I found the additional emphasis on material and margin notes invaluable. Keeping your books in pristine condition actually detracts from their value as far as I'm concerned. :)
I've read and listened to many comparisons of the iPod and Kindle, but there's always one fact left out:
When I bought an iPod, I immediately populated it with my CD collection.
If I buy a Kindle, well, it's empty.
I think the business model needs some way to populate the darn thing with discounted versions of books I already own in print form.
What value is the device to me, as a traveler, if I get a craving to read something I already own, and it's sitting on my self at home?
How to implement this? I have no idea. But what I do know is that my CD's now live in a closet while my music is all digital. I'd like to do the same with my books and regain several walls of shelf space. Right now, the Kindle doesn't do that for me.
Umm how is this insightful - it's not true. You CAN surf the WEB on the Kindle. It's not a terribly full featured browser but it does have Java and it can be used to browse. I seem to recall Google Maps working on it for instance. ALT +1 while in the browser brings up your current location for instance.
some tips: http://thekindle.wordpress.com/2008/01/15/kindle-bonus-undocumented-shortcuts-features-and-easter-eggs/
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
I dunno, to me not every real book is worth more than an electronic copy. In some cases yet, but not in every case.
And what if Amazon started a deal where, after you buy the kindle (or a kindle like device), you could pay a reasonable monthly fee and download as many books as you like? Better yet, a cheaper kindle that can only hold 50 books, so you can only have 50 at a time, but as you read and delete them a new one is downloaded from your amazon queue automatically?
It wouldn't totally get rid of all my paper books, but I could probably get rid of at least 90% of them if something like the above existed.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Of course, you could just as easily just buy used books and save trees very effectively.
http://www.betterworld.com/custom.aspx?f=impact
Donate/sell the books when your done with them and save even more carbon foot print.
http://www.betterworld.com/buyback.aspx :-)
I have the Sony reader. Cost justification is only part of the equation. But I do like that Sony gave away 100 free public domain titles with the reader. Sure I could find them on the web and read them for free already, but if I wanted a "take it with me" version I would have probably shelled out $4.99 for a paperback. Of course, if you don't read the classics, its moot, but I felt like I got a good $100-$200 worth of free books if I consider my own valuation of them (I might value the Poe collection at $10 but another book at $1). Top it all of with the fact that I'm still saving on a per title basis and the Sony reader is cheaper than the Kindle and I feel pretty good about the purchase.
If you want to factor in things like reselling, then you also need to bring in factors like free digital books. On the 100% legitimate front, there's stuff like Gutenberg and many publishers do offer ebooks for free. Rather less legitimately, digital books are widely available on many torrent sites in vast quantities.
As for "some" inconvenience in reselling books - you're kidding, right? Making auctions, making sure you get paid, dealing with packing, shipping, etc. I suppose, if your time is worth somewhere around minimum wage the amount you'd save by buying used and taking the time to resell them would make sense, but I'm going to guess you don't make minimum wage.
As for the convenience issues you bring up, bringing the Kindle into the bathtub is easy: I put mine inside 2 large ziplocs (with the seals facing opposite each other) and voila, it's completely waterproof unless I were to submerge it and try to force water in. Ditto for the beach, etc. You can make margin notes (not as easily as scribbling on paper, but they are electronic and thus searchable), make bookmarks/dogears, etc. And, of course, being fully digital, the text itself is completely searchable, which is HUGE for anything other than a novel (and could still be good for novels for some people who like to reference things). Beyond that, can you highlight a word in a paper book and instantly get a definition of it? Or how about highlighting a name or place in the book and pull up a wikipedia article on it to get some basic background? Can you carry your entire library with you when you go on a trip?
From what you've mentioned, the only area in which the paper book wins is in how easy it is to make margin notes (assuming you've got a writing implement handy, of course), and everything else seems to be even or vastly in favor of ebooks.
Of course, it all really comes down to individual preference. Some people really REALLY love paper printed books, won't read on anything else, and some people don't need that. But trying to claim that paper printed books are somehow much cheaper/more convenient/more functional using arguments that are easily shown to be false is just silly.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
The thing is that there are already tons of "no-profit" textbooks out there - books that professors wrote because they didn't like any of the existing texts, and wanted something different for their classes. I had a number of classes with texts like this. Generally, the profs are prohibited from earning profits on these things... but the publishing companies and bookstores are not, and they don't end up being much cheaper than any other text. This sort of thing would be perfect for e-book distro - the prof could just issue the books straight to his/her students at essentially no cost. And this could conceivably force down prices for other texts, as students gravitated toward the professors with the lowest book costs.
Other than the 'bay where are you finding decent eBooks in this manner?
And it's right out there in TFA... e-book readers cost too damn much money. You'd have to be buying 50 books a year before it makes sense to buy a Kindle, and most of us aren't spending that much on books. The "can't read in bathtub" "don't like the screen" "DRM makes me mad" arguments are all just icing on the cake.
And apparently it's not just annoying /. geeks who have reached this conclusion, as the Kindle does not appear to be on track to replace the printed book any time soon. If Amazon really wanted to change the reading world, they'd be giving away huge numbers of Kindles... then maybe they'd get somewhere.
One issue was that the other person I was reading with used a different font and when I'd try to ask opinions of things I'd find that the numbering system was inconsistent because of the font difference - that sucked!
That's why they use locations - locations are absolute and don't depend on your font size. I'm a new Kindle user so maybe I'm missing something here, but the problem you're referring to is solved, I thought.
Unless, of course, locations are dynamic to the individual Kindles. . . but that seems really stupid.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Would it? Would it really? Think about how much it takes to manufacture all of the electronic parts for the Kindle. How many of those parts (plastic, certain chemicals) are actually worse for the environment than biodegradable books. The kindle also requires constant energy to read the materials on it, while a book is energy free if you use the sun (minus the cost of turning pages). This is the kind of study I'd really like to see. How many books do you have to have on the kindle to equal the amount of energy spent on normal books. Manufacturing, Shipping, Downloading should all be factors in this.
Why would how many books you _read_ in a year have anything to do with the breakeven point? The relevant figure is how many books you _buy_ in a year. Besides, the beauty of a Kindle is that it can replace a whole bookcase full of books. Of course, a bookcase full of books might impress visitors more than a Kindle, but in terms of readability, it's no advantage. Calculate how many square feet of floor space your bookcase takes up, and express that as a percentage of the size of your house. Now look up on www.zillow.com and see how much you could sell your house for. Now you know how much a Kindle will save you in real estate costs, which is the real savings. My house is worth about one Kindle per square foot, so I'd start saving money the moment I bought a Kindle. I'm waiting for version 2, though.
Convenience is one of the factors that decisively tip the scales *away* from Kindle, or any of the electronic media I've seen so far. Electronic media are fine for listening to, and adequate for videos. They are appalling for extended reading.
Also, I tend to read several different books at once, often with place markers in several different places. I rarely write in the books, but I frequently write on the markers. This is secondary, however.
And, of course, another factor is that books are permanent. (Well, relatively so.) I still have many books from 20 years ago. I don't reference them often, but when I do there's frequently no other source for the particular thing that I'm after. (No, the web doesn't suffice. It's got lots of things, but there are still large areas where it's coverage is quite sparse. Especially in materials that were published before the web was ubiquitous.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I can imagine someone saying the same about MP3s in the 90s...
Kindle is just a lock-in product. The Kindle should be free since you have to buy "Kindle format" books for it. The Kindle does not even support PDF format!!!
I have a Sony e-book reader. It supports PDF and works great.
Amazon should immediately apologize for trying this crap with the Kindle and discontinue it. It is basically Amazons way of saying they think people today are finally dumb enough to fall for something like this.
It is amazing to me the how emotional people are about this product. Especially on site like this one where people a not exactly afraid of technology.
To look at the Kindle strictly in a "how-many-books-do-need-to-buy-to-break-even" totally misses the point of this device. It's like saying, "Well, I can get records for 99c a piece, and one iTune song is 99c, so I can NEVER justify the price of an iPod."
The Kindle has revolutionized reading for me. I have owned the device for almost a year now and have read about 50 books on it. Most I have gotten off Project Gutenberg, so I paid nothing for them. The books I have bought off Amazon, I have never paid more than 9.99 for, and most less than that...
Okay, so I am getting off topic, I am doing exactly what I said people should not do. Let's look at the intangibles. I am in the Navy, when I go to sea, books used to be a significant part of the weight of my sea bag. What is the value of having 20#+ I used to lug around reduced to a few oz? :)
When you reading late and your eyes are getting tired and vision blurred, what is the value of instantly being able to increase the font size and keep reading?
What is the value of being able to hit a button to turn the page, thus less time is spent not reading? (yes, there is the "flash", but its time is short than a manual page turn, plus, just like page turning, you mind get used to it and you do not notice as you are reading)
What is the value of free internet anywhere you are in the US? I was lost in San Jose the other day, google maps and my kindle took me home. No need for a GPS for me.
What is the value of reading a newspaper, quickly, conveniently, without killing trees! ?
I know, I can go on and on and on.. and many will say, "Well my iPhone can do that...or my Laptop" True, though I cannot IMAGINE reading on an iPhone, the lack of back lighting is key to reduced eye-strain on the Kindle. And either way you need a wireless data plan.
Anyhoo...sorry for my rant, just cheeses me off (who says that?) that most complaints about the kindle are by people who have never really used it for a significant amount of time and fail to see how revolutionary the device is. It may not be for you, and that's cool. Just understand it is highly useful for some people.
The point of the kindle, and devices like it is not to be price competitive with books. It's to offer people a convenient way to store and read books.
As usual, kdawson and the people he approves for articles miss the point entirely.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
not every real book is worth more than an electronic copy
Totally couldn't agree more. However, when you start reading a book you're going to make an investment of your time. Buying the paper copy; or, even better, getting the electronic copy free from Gutenberg is a way of protecting that investment. You're sure you can easily share it later. Since you can never be sure which books are worthwhile it's worth getting all of them DRM free.
There are also other ways to cut down that 90%. Sell your books in bulk to second hand book stores. Put them about through various book sharing schemes. Sell them in low volume through some reseller on the internet.
Even better is to find a lending library near you. Get most books from there. You get the benefits of cheap access and you can still even share the books.
Finally, a good thing to do is to subscribe to a source of book reviews. The New Yorker or the London Review of Books for example. Or most decent newspapers have a review seciton. Even slashdot has reviews, though they might not fit your taste. This will give you a better chance of buying books you like, so most books will be ones you want to keep and/or share.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
if the convenience factor wasn't part of the equation. At two books per month, breakeven would be in three years.
After living in an apartment for almost 3 years, I was drowning in so many books that I had to get rid of them. It broke my heart. The "breakeven" point for me is a clean bookshelf.
No, I will not work for your startup
I ran these numbers the fucking day they announced the price. That's why I don't own a Kindle. Doesn't EVERYONE try to protect themselves from stupid decisions in this way? Or do you all wait until you've owned a product for a fucking year before doing the pre-purchase investigation? Jeeezes! This is why our planet is a fuck-ball.