For an organisation which built its empire on books, Amazon really doesn’t know much about those of us who consider ourselves avid readers.
For instance, they measure their Kindle battery life at half an hour’s reading a day. This enables them to claim absurdly, unrealistically, long battery life, which would be dishonest were it not for the fact Continue reading
A quote in the Guardian, about the Kindle and ereaders in particular, from Kate Pool, deputy general secretary of the Royal Society of Authors, “It is not that I am a Luddite… I want to be sure I am not buying the wrong thing. I don’t want to be left with a Betamax when everyone else is watching VHS.”
I rather doubt that will happen.
The VHS – Betamax thing was a farce. Betamax was technically Continue reading
. . . leaves a lot to be desired.
I’ve complained before about the cost of some ebooks, most recently here and further research impresses me not at all. This, for example, is Waterstone’s take on the subject:-
All prices of eBooks are set by the publishers, but as a general guideline they should be around the same price as a hardback or cheaper. At Waterstones.com we are making every effort to offer our customers good value on all eBooks, therefore you will often find reductions from the RRP on our site.
I know I’ve said this, but it bears repeating – ebooks have no Continue reading
In preparation for getting my Kindle, and because I hate delaying gratification, I spent a few hours downloading ebooks yesterday. It is, I have to say, a hugely time-consuming process. However, as I have no shortage of time, that’s not a problem.
First step was installing Amazon’s Kindle for PC software, to stash downloads from the Amazon Kindle Store (as it turned out, I didn’t have to – Amazon would have archived them – oh well).
So, over the course of the late afternoon-early evening, I downloaded Continue reading
As regular readers will have noticed, I’ve ordered an Amazon Kindle, delivery due around the end of the month. I bought it for two reasons – I’m running out of space for books, and it’s becoming difficult and painful for me to hold books, particularly heavy ones, and it’s the latter that I’ve been thinking about.
My previous Kindle post is here.
The Kindle, would be useful, even valuable, to those Continue reading
Note: as happened with words like e-mail and on-line, e-book and e-reader are rapidly losing their hyphens, which is the format I’ve opted for here. Interestingly, the Word spell-checker recognises ebook, but not ereader.
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Regular readers will know that I feel that ereaders are very much a solution in search of a problem, and that many ebooks are overpriced. No way is there any justification for Continue reading
