UK Kindle and E-Books...

Got a PRS-300 on sunday, love it so far :)
Very easy on the eyes, same as a real book.
There are thousands of e-bboks available to download free of charge as well.
Handy for me as both spare room's walls are already crammed with bookshelves, and starting to pile up in boxes now.
 
VeNT said:
cheap? how so?
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For sci-fi for example have a look at www.webscriptions.net which is run by Baen (who also have their "free library"), the selection of authors is relatively small (about 100 or so mainly sci-fi ones), but they have some cracking prices :) (I got hooked on Honor Harrington after I think Gilly mentioned the series and I found them on Baen for <£4 a book).

Manybooks.net has a lot of books of various genres that are either out of copyright, or have been made free for non commercial use/distribution, and various of the publishers sites are starting to do a free copy of say book 1 in a series (something Baen have been doing for about 10 years with their library).

tor.com often has short stories and sometimes full length books for free download to registered users.

And those are just some of the legitimate ones:)
 
Perywinkle said:
Got a PRS-300 on sunday, love it so far :)
Very easy on the eyes, same as a real book.
There are thousands of e-bboks available to download free of charge as well.
Handy for me as both spare room's walls are already crammed with bookshelves, and starting to pile up in boxes now.
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Is the 300 pocketable like they state?
 
Must say, I quite fancy a Sony PRS-600. Anybody know if it can display PDF documents well? I know it states that it's a supported format, but I've been caught out like that before today :)
 
i just get real books, then when i finished it, go to my local pub or my work canteen and juts swap it for something else. i read a lot.

i could NEVER envisage myself spending £100 to be able to read a book. imo i think its laughable that these companies have been able to extort so much money from these guilable people on hardware that looks so simple and is so limited.

paperbacks ***!
 
Nickg said:
its laughable that these companies have been able to extort so much money from these guilable people*!
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:confused: you can't carry several books around with you, Books cost about 3 times more. There's nothing fleecing about them, or limited. They are designed to read books on and for that they are very good. It's also new tech and with all new tech it will hold a premium until it gets more main stream.
 
why would i want to carry several books? i am not going to mars/

1 book is enough, finish it, find another book... never need to carry more than a book...

the only thing i could see being decent for a e-reader is like magazine subscriptions where they are automatically beamed out each month...save me having to go round to me mams to pick up my Evo each month...

the price is fleecing. the functionality of the units is limited. you can get a netbook for a similar cost that does more than just display text in a huge font.
 
do they show pictures? many books have pictures, photographs in them.. for instance, 'storm on the horizon' which i picked up at my local pub has a central spattering of colour pictures of the crews in Iraq, not to mention tactical maps and other illustrations too..


reading a bookt rhough an ereader gives it a completely faceless persona imono unique cover, pictures, pages etc... just like any old word doc...
 
AcidHell2 said:
Trips, business trips, hollidays and so on.
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Of course another difference is that if someone steals my book, or I leave the thing in the hotel room - so what. Different matter with one of these. The ability to store more than one book is the only advantage it has. In all other respects it's a solution in search of a problem. Great for submarines and spacecraft, rubbish for all else. I read a lot of books, and I take four or five when I go on holiday - but I still can't see the need for one of these. And won't until they are £7.99 each, so that breaking it or losing it doesn't matter.



M
 
Meridian said:
Of course another difference is that if someone steals my book, or I leave the thing in the hotel room - so what. Different matter with one of these. The ability to store more than one book is the only advantage it has. In all other respects it's a solution in search of a problem. Great for submarines and spacecraft, rubbish for all else. I read a lot of books, and I take four or five when I go on holiday - but I still can't see the need for one of these. And won't until they are £7.99 each, so that breaking it or losing it doesn't matter.



M
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so you leave and break you phone and replace it for £7.99 a pop. What a silly statement.
There are a lot of free books and ones you buy for are considerably cheaper than paper version. So works out cheaper in the long run.
 
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Aye if you can find a good supplier of the books they can work out very cheap on an ereader - I think the books on my one have so far averaged at about £2 each, including the cost of the reader (100 books that came with it, about 25 books bought from Baen for £40, another hundred or so from various other sources including baen's free library).
Hopefully with the Kindle coming out the average price of Ebooks from other stores will drop from the current "paper back RRP" type pricing to something that reflects the reduction in production costs (IIRC it costs about 1/4 penny per page to print a book, so an ebook RRP should really be at least £1-2 below the paperback RRP).

The cost of the ereader is considerably less than many people will pay out on a mobile phone*, and if you read a reasonable amount will likely get a lot more use than a mobile ;) and for some people something like a reader makes much more sense than a mobile (as you can make the same sort of argument about the costs of mobiles that can be made about the cost of an ereader, and yet a lot of people won't bat an eyelid at the yearly cost of a fancy mobile on contract).

Also, and I don't think anyone has mentioned this yet, one very major bonus of an Ereader is that it can almost always do large print, for any book available on it.
That may not sound much until you realise how hard/expensive it can be to locate large print books (I suspect if Sony and Amazon where to make that a selling point they would see a lot of sales to "wrinklies", I know it's certainly been one of the things that has impressed a lot of my dad's friends, and is one of the reasons he loves his).

I personally wouldn't be without an ereader now, as I love reading but it was reaching the point where I was having to buy books then get rid of them after reading (there are only so many times you can really request a particular book at the local library, and even that costs £1.50 or so a time), with the reader I'm able to have hundreds of books taking up less space on my shelves than a single paperback.
I still buy the paper books, but now it's just those that I really want such as the new Pratchetts, Banks or Hamiltons.


*What's the average cost of a monthly contract with a "fashionable" or all singing/dancing phone? ;) (from what I can see t's normally about £30ish)
 
Looks like a great product, although the Kindle has the added cost for international users currently.. which pushes a lot of books over retail for the physical copy! Which seems a tad mad.

Had a look at the Sony and was very impressed with the display as many have said I was slightly skeptical but they've done a great job on making it as unlike traditional displays as possible; I'm going to have a read up on the technology after someones mentioned it in here.

Can see it being a big hit at christmas and with greater devices appearing a price is only round the corner!
 
sorry to thread hijack but anyone know where i can get ereader versions of mainstream books.

ie NYT bestsellers etc. Jeffrey Deaver, Koontz, Terry Brooks et al?

I used to by from ereader.com but now they are US only site due to the spectacular way that copyright laws are still decades behind the tech.

No chance of changing either I mean why allow people to by the book for 8 dollars in the US when you can sell the same book for 15 euros to the dumb europeans.
 
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