Be Excellent To Each Other

Yeah, that's reasonable. They should do a mail-in service where you send in paper books and get the ebook version free. Apart from pretty books, obv.

That's because it's a better product.

My experience of buying a David Eddings book from Amazon (my paperback has fallen apart from 20 years of over-reading) left me with a sour taste. None of the maps were included in the digital copy, so I had to scan them myself, convert the .mobi to .zhtml, edit the html to include the images, then reconvert to .mobi to get what I already had as a paperback. And I had to pay more for the digital copy than I would've for a new paperback. Fucking clowns.

Yeah, but I assume that was punishment for reading Eddings...

A Kindle isn't designed to replace nice hardback first editions. It's meant to replace paperbacks. I'm not going to rebuy any books I currently own, the same way I won't buy Blu-rays for stuff I already own on DVD.

I don't know where I stand on downloading books you already own a physical copy of. I think I'm ok with it, but I wouldn't do it myself.

I've done it - mainly because I want to reread a series and struggle with the very idea of actually picking up a paper book to do so.

Same here. I've rebought paperbacks I've leant out or misplaced and I rebought Anathem because my 1st edition hardback is 1100 pages and weighs well over a kilo (so is borderline impossible to read).

Yeah, this is the problem I now have. I have tons of unread books on my shelves and have absolutely no intention of ever reading them now.

I may just get rid and just buy the ones I want to read on the Kindle, although that could get expensive...

I torrent the eBooks I already own paper versions of. I then give away any paperbacks (to charity shops & relatives) I no longer need. I will always buy hardbacks as they look nice on my shelves.

No way am I paying for books I've already paid out for, regardless of format.

Stock Myp response #3. I think you'll find that the Kindle was designed to replace books. Pretty sure that was their intention when making it. Would be quite odd if they were just aiming to replace paperbacks during the design phase. That's why you can buy new books for a pound more than the nice hardback when they're released.

Anyway, I have over 2000 books upstairs so replacing them all would be prohibitively expensive. I have issues with the way that they've found to sell us the same books again. It just stinks to high heaven of the film industry changing the format on which you can buy films every 10 years or so to try and get you to buy them again. 3D books next?

I don't think in their wildest dreams that Amazon expects you to throw away your books in favour of digital copy stored in THE CLOUD. But perhaps when you come to buy a new book, nothing special, just a run of the mill paperback that someone recommended to you, then you'll buy a kindle copy instead. And from now on. FOREVER.

Indeed! There's no way we're getting rid of our book collection just because I have a Kindle.

Yeah, I probably would if you could rip books as easily as you can rip CDs, though.

They're not going to kill the coffee table book business until they have an a3 sized full colour self-illuminated version of the Kindle for home reading.

That'd be nice.

They were probably aiming to give an alternative medium for most books, but it's never going to work for some items. Books on art with reproductions of paintings, books where design and layout is key.

I couldn't replace my knitting pattern books with kindle versions. It's ok for more instructional books, where the bulk of the book is about how to knit, and things like that, but for... I don't know, a book of Jumpers to Knut, you're going to want to see the artwork in a better form than on the kindle, and colourwork charts will not work, especially larger charts.

I must say, I do love the kindle. I like to read whilst laying on my front, but with a paper book I have to keep moving my arm to turn pages. With my kindle I just keep my thumb in place and press to turn. Plus portability, etc etc.

GTFF! I'm no wearing funny glasses just so I can read books.





Oh

This is, and always was, a facile argument. If you don't find the quality and convenience upgrade of re-buying music you own on LP on CD, or re-buying a DVD as a Bluray, or re-buying a book as an ebook, then the answer is simple: don't do it. There's no sinister conspiracy to make your old stuff stop working or somehow worthless, so there's no reason to upgrade unless you want to upgrade -- and if the company can convince you the upgrade is worth it, then there's nothing to complain about.

If Amazon and/or the book publishers started sneaking into your house and tearing pages from your old books, then you'd have a point. Until then, the books you have are just the same as they always were.

The interesting question for coffee table books is whether things like the iPad can replace them. Apple's announcement last week was focussed on text books, but the interactivity features it is touting -- colour, animation, illustrations, video, flexible layouts -- could also make the iPad a player in the coffee table book market. The question comes down to whether consumers will prefer a heavy, glossy, luxurious book (with, I'd argue, a superior feel) to the superior features a tablet could bring. It'll be interesting to watch this over the coming years.

Amazon have released a "send to Kindle" PC application.
You basically "print" stuff to your Kindle, so it works with anything that can be printed out.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/? ... gmgamzn-20

Oh, the clever fuckers.

@Gaywood, VHS disagrees

& I've a load of now obsolete videos that I'll never have the opportunity to buy on DVD. Feart of the day when my player breaks & I cannae fix it

I reckon that you'll still be able to source a working VHS machine for as long as you are alive. But again it's just progress, not some kind of cynical ploy.

Interesting to think, though, that only a couple of years ago everyone was thrilled when Amazon released the desktop version of the Kindle software so they could read books on their PCs. Now it seems we're heading the other way.

I'd argue we're heading in the direction of "access all our stuff on all our stuff". That's a common-sense good thing.

Coffee table books are usually large format for a reason, I think. I've only seen iPads in shops, and from across the room at Myp's house, but I don't think that you could enjoy the aesthetics of such visual content on a screen the size of an iPad as you could a 16" square book of beautiful things. To see images in the same detail you'd have to zoom in so far that you'd lose sight of the whole picture.

Also, I think Kindles are affordable to many people in a way that iPads aren't.

Optimistic I know, but is it possible to just send it to your Amazon Kindle account without actually having a physical Kindle registered? I just use the Android app.

If we're talking about the £50 high-end full-colour book market, affordability is a non-issue.

I'm not disagreeing that the physical book has its own advantages -- I'm wondering aloud if those advantages outweigh the iPad's or not.

I think that's a bit short sighted. I have a couple of beautiful 16" square coffee table books. They are beautiful books that retail at £20 but I got them for £5.99. I used to have a few others that were even cheaper. They may have been from discount stores, sales or second hand, and I can't afford an iPad.

And the advantages of iPad content over a large coffee table books mean that you are using the publication in a different way. Many coffee table books are produced and bought for their aesthetics, if you can't fully realise the format of the images on an iPad then it's essentially a different product, so not comparing like with like. More like comparing art with an Encarta article on that piece of art.

That was @DocG.

By the way, I'm not saying that one is better than the other, just that you can't replace some beautiful books with a small format electronic version.

Actually, I think it's because my Kindle app is registered to Amazon.co.uk rather than .com

Is that really any different to the fact that you can just email anything to your kindle right now?

File/Print (or even 'click the print toolbar button') is easier than Save, <switch to gmail>, Compose, Attach, Send, <switch back>?

That and 'save as HTML/PDF/whatever Kindle supports' is historically shit in just about everything, unlike printing.

If you have a local mail client, it's 'File -> Save & Send' which is just as easy. I guess it's convenient if you don't though.

Doesn't it charge you for that?

If you send it to [email protected] it'll charge you, and deliver it to you over 3G or wifi

If you send it to [email protected] it's free, but will only deliver over wifi.

If that's the case then this new way of doing things isn't going to be any better as all it'll be doing in the background is saving to PDF then sending over the the Kindle (it even clarifies on the Amazon site that "documents are delivered in PDF format"). They'll be talking about 'printing' just because it's a concept that people already understand so it's easier to grasp.

A pound MORE? For the vast majority of new, hardback releases that I've seen, the Kindle version has been cheaper. The latest Terry Pratchett hardback, for instance, was a fiver on Kindle.

Easier to go from well-formed printer output to PDF than trusting individual applications to get it right.

I'm not saying that accurate document conversion to PDF isn't possible, just that app vendors are historically shit at it - if they even bother trying (and many don't, which is why 'print to pdf' drivers are desirable enough that Microsoft wrote one).

Printing to PDF is good because it instantly converts stuff to a single file that anyone can read using freely available software; as opposed to either (a) proprietary file formats like .doc or (b) files that can only be saved accurately as a jumble of other filetypes like when you save a web page. I'm not convinced that the ability to print to PDF was ever driven by the actual formatting of the output because I'm pretty sure this is still done by the application in question e.g. if you select to print a webpage from Firefox I'm pretty sure it's still Firefox that's formatting the content before the converstion to PDF, it's not the driver itself that's doing this. Unless I'm totally wrong about that; anyone who knows for sure care to weigh in?

What if you send it to [email protected] and you don't have 3G?

It'll deliver it to you over wifi, and charge you for it. So don't do that.

no, you've got that the wrong way around. Over wifi is free. It's via 3G that it charges.

So, GY, if you don't have 3G, only wifey, then [email protected] will be free. But you night's as well use the free address if you have a 3G enabled version.

Wifey?

Sure? I understood it was only free if you sent it via the free address.

No, my kindle guide said that it will always try to deliver it for free over wifi first, but if that's not available it will deliver via 3G for a fee.

If you use the free address it forces the kindle to wait for a wifi connection.

But there's no point in not using the free address, anyway, if you want to transfer via wifi.

The kindle documentation should confirm this, but it is how I remember/understood it. Check for yourself to be sure, but I'm sure I remember it saying that.

You're just misunderstanding me - I'm just saying that apps that offer "save as <format that isn't their own>" tend to do a shit job of it, if they do it at all, whereas they tend to get printing to paper right.

So it makes sense to sit as a printer driver on the other side of the generic Windows printer stuff and convert that to PDF well - it effectively adds the functionality to apps that don't have it, and works around fuck-ups of apps that do a bad "straight to PDF" job.

Edit: And yes, Windows apps generate the formatted output as a slightly specialised "window" using the standard Windows API calls, then the printer driver takes that and does whatever it needs to put it on paper (or in a PDF).

A Corgi somehow found its way into my house while I was asleep and chewed up all my David Eddings books. I'd like to think it was coincidence, but....

Check its collar. If it has "Property of Jeff Bezos" on the collar, it's definitive evidence of the conspiracy.

It just has "RAND Corporation" on it. I think it may be a reverse vampire.