Be Excellent To Each Other

A quick google reveals that lots of places have it for SUPACHEAP^TM.

So the actual answer was "JFGI"?

Help me out man... I've just very nearly paid for it from fictionwise!

And google it I did, but not knowing the name of the book didn't help. And I am an ebbok noob.

What format do you go for on fictionwaise, Cras?

Ooh, look. A PDF version....

*whistles*

They're all DRMd on there, of those the secure PDF format is probably the best.

By Supacheap, I mean yarring it - most of the page of results for "His Dark Materials eBook" is torrent sites or rapidshare links.

*winks*

Also, you can un-DRM the PDF version by the simple expedient of transferring it to the reader then pulling it back off again.

Secure.

That book is $12 whever you look. Odd. Must be popular

Haha! Really?

My knob is so DRM free.

I'm very happy with my Kindle, by the way. Fuller report when I'm back from the States.

Yeah - brilliant, eh? The format doesn't appear to actually carry any DRM on the device - it's 'secured' by making Adobe Secure PDF the only way to open the file and get it onto the device.

So you could send me every ebook you've ever bought?

We need to start a book sharing club.

Yep, if I could be bothered to pull them off the device.

*Knowledge filed away*

Kindle SDK?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/21/kindle_sdk/
Interesting.

Great ad for Penguin. Make sure you watch it in order or you'll spoil the punchline.

It's very clever, but I'm not really sure what it's saying. "It's all fine really, print is here to stay"? Fair enough, I don't really think that's much in doubt. I'm not happy with an ad from a publisher that's basically saying "Ignore everything that's going on, we're going to carry on doing what we do, and not even think about what changes might be needed to our business model, because we have faith in the kids, innit."

Perhaps you'd like to see some of Penguin's proposed ebook/app hybrids:

So what's the message in the earlier ad, then?

Also, it's all very well coming up with new products, but how are they planning on selling their old products? What they're basically saying there is "We're going to turn into a software vendor to provide interactive books". But that's not the major issue facing publishing. The major issue is what you do with your pricing and distribution when you suddenly have a product that requires no physical creation or distribution? And one that's subject to piracy, when you've never previously had to deal with such issues?

*bumping another old thread ninja stylee*
My name is kim.
I'm a heavy kindle user. I can't stop. I read 10+ books a week. I get the shakes when my kindle is at home and I am somewhere else.

That being said... there are other ways to erm... get your books on the kindle without giving $ to Jeff Bezos.

I have a Kindle, and I love it long time.
What with books being so cheap, is it really worth yarring them?

$6.99-$9.99 per book
x10 books a week on average for me = $69.99-$99.99 per week on average
or
Almost $400 a month spent on books.

So yes. For me. If it's an author I admire, whose book I am sure to read again.. I buy it. If it's something I already own in hardcopy or is just light reading crap... yoink.

Mmm. What the kindle needs is some parallel to the humble library.

Buy longer books.

That or work your way through the Guttenberg Project.

10 books a week? Wow. How do you have the time? I haven't read 10 books this year

Used to read 3 or 4 a week when I was at school though, from the library.

Dave's comment is an good one.

I read a lot. I've yarred a few books, where the publisher hasn't actually got around to releasing an ebook yet. Typically quality is poor - one book was clearly misaligned on a scanner because it was missing the first half dozen lines on every page.

I don't own any eBooks. I'm going to have a look at iBooks when it comes out for the iPhone, and see if I can read anything without screaming at the justified text.

WHY HAVE THEY DONE THIS IT'S SO HORRIBLE. Kindle is just as bad.

I've never noticed it on the Kindle (if I start noticing now I'll be fucking angry with you two). Maybe it's because I use the small font size?

Heh, so I've heard. The almost complete lack of consideration for typography* and the fact that publishers seem to want to charge the same or more than physical copies are the only two things making me hesitate about shelling out any cash on eBooks.


*seriously, books are almost 100% type; why would you not put the effort in? I died a little inside on the iPhone 4's advert, where the software guy said, holding up iBooks, “Look at the typography. It's perfect!” while rivers flooded through the text. If you can't be arsed to write some basic hyphenation into the programs, just set it all ragged-right, for fuck's sake.

Hang on, layman me - what's wrong with the text in the Kindle?

If the text is justified without hyphenation, elastic word/letter spacing etc. you quite easily end up with massive rivers between words where the software has increased the word-spacing to fit the measure. It makes your eyes and brain skip about, where it should seamlessly move from one word to the next in a proper rhythm.

I see what you mean now (although that picture has hyphenation). Reading it with lots of words per line and a small font size means I hardly notice this on the Kindle.

The longer the measure (number of characters on a line), the less likely those rivers are to materialise, obviously due to a likely increased frequency of shorter words to plug any gaps.

This is what Whinnie the Pooh in iBooks looks like:

Urg. That's pretty bad, really.

Although I assume you can read it in one-page-at-a-time mode so the problem of having 3 words on a line should hopefully be lessened.

*Predicts Grim...'s Kindle is about to find its way to landfill*

The Sony does ragged right. As nature intended.

Yes. Smaller text makes it happen a lot less.

Ebook pricing is facing a crisis. Something like 90% of book expenses are marketing, copyediting, proofreading, typesetting, etc; so to the publisher the value of an ebook and a physical book are almost the same.

But readers have been trained for years to associate value with the physical product, by the existence of more luxurious and more expensive hard back editions. To the consumer, the value of an ebook is obviously lower even before you factor in the lower utility value.

No-one knows how to square that circle yet.

That's how iBooks looks in portrait mode. In landscape, it's just a single page, with more text on.

I have no issue with paying standard RRP. The publishers do need to realise that they can't charge hardback prices just because their physical copy isn't out in paperback yet though.

I still simply refuse to accept this "fact", mainly because it relies entirely on how many books they sell.

Whatnow?

How you can't stand to read it now that you've noticed it uses block capital centralised text in italic comic sans.

Like I said, it looks fine on mine, mainly because I don't have the view setting cranked up to "granddad".

See? That's not too bad.

Also: crap book

Heh!