[Closed] Kindles..

Iv'e got a 1st generation one, the only time I use it is when I go abroad cos It saves carrying books.
I much prefer old fashioned books me.

Well, you're not guaranteed to find a book used for £2. And you can often find kindle books for under £6- it's pretty rare I'll pay that tbh. (weirdly, there is VAT to pay on ebooks but not paper books). I just bought about 6 in the sale for under a tenner for the lot, frinstance

I did prefer paper books but tbf the space saving alone's made a huge difference for me. If I could easily rip a book like I ripped my CDs to mp3, I'd do it right now and sell or donate most of the paper ones i have, just to get the shelves back. And it's great for trips etc. I did find that it took a bit of time to get used to it, but I'm glad I stuck with it, you might find the same.

And it is hard to give it to someone else to read too.

Not all are that expensive though or there are times when they are on promotion. But lets face it someone has coughed up £100+ for you already - they are not a cheap way to read.

There is one brilliant thing about them though - but you are not going to like it as it is even more money. When you buy a kindle book you very often get the option to buy the audiobook from audible at the same time for a fraction of rrp - typically £4-5. If they are 'whispersync ready' the kindle and the audiobook sync with each other so if you put the kindle down and start to listen to your audiobook on your phone (or wherever) it starts where the book left off. When you get back in bed (or wherever you actually read) and pick the kindle back up again it is on the right page to continue. As someone who is not the fastest reader and has little time to read it has revolutionised my literary consumption as I'm also 'reading' when I'm making dinner, on the turbo, cutting the grass etc.

I have a Kindle and I use it for most of my reading, give it a real shot, you might warm to it. It's undeniably convenient for travel or if you like to have a few books on the go at once. I'll still buy a hard copy if the price is right though, I like that you can enjoy the book and pass it on to a friend, something you can't usually do with a (legit) ebook. Also, I find the Kindle isn't the best medium for an illustrated book, even if it's only got a line drawn maps.
Pricing for ebooks is very dubious too, there's usually little saving over a new paperback which strikes me as unrealistic when the whole physical production and inventory side of retail is being dispensed with.

"And it is hard to give it to someone else to read too."

Yep, fair play, I forgot how much this pisses me off

Every month they discount 60 books down to £1 each. Usually mid month the list get refreshed. I have a lot of books still to read from when they used to do the top 100 free book charts when they were starting out, picked up a few gems that way.

Failing that there is always torrenting....

Wouldn’t be without mine now. It goes anywhere I do.
I don’t buy many for £5-£6.
Kindle unlimited is pretty good.

Pricing for ebooks is very dubious too, there’s usually little saving over a new paperback which strikes me as unrealistic when the whole physical production and inventory side of retail is being dispensed with.

A salient point.

Kindle unlimited is pretty good

I canny be doing with another subscription.

When I buy e books they are usually £4 ish instead of £6 in paper form, so happy with the pricing. You can share books within a household, but for me the only downer is not being able to lend them to other people. But I don't do that much anyway. The advantages are huge though. Traveling and general convenience, and being a able to browse the store based on other people's choices turns up some great new stuff. Then there's stuff like being able to read the same book on different devices in sync so if I have a spare moment during the day I can read a few pages ony phone or tablet if I'm say at work. Then of course you don't have to find shelves to put paper books on any more.

I love Kindles, there really is no need to be chopping down trees, bleaching the crap out of them and shipping the round the world any more.

i was directed to gutenberg for free books, got a load of 'classics' for nowt. all of george orwells books f'rinstance.
https://www.gutenberg.org/

Some people with less morals also use modern tech to get there books for free like they do with movies.

Pricing for ebooks is very dubious too, there’s usually little saving over a new paperback which strikes me as unrealistic when the whole physical production and inventory side of retail is being dispensed with.

Physical print and distribution of a book makes up only a tiny fraction of the cost of book production, and in the case of ebooks is replaced by the cost of the internet delivery mechanism. E-commerce storefronts, payment processing mechanisms, bandwidth and storage space don’t come for free.

Author Charles Stross breaks down the book creation process very well here, and you’ll note nearly all of these steps need to be done whether it’s an ebook or a physical book. Note this was written back in 2010 at the point ebooks were only really just staring to take off. I’m sure he or John Scalzi has written another post on why ebook pricing is what it is, but my Google-Fu is failing me this morning.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-how-books-are-made.html

And onto this the ludicrous fact that VAT is charged on ebooks but not physical ones, and you can understand why ebooks aren’t cheaper.

Basic economics: price should be what the market will bear rather than cost+margin.

Anyway, Kindle has a couple of other advantages:
- you can read in the dark and avoid waking up your partner
- you can increase the font size to suit

Pictures suck though.

The library is free! They'll order in books you want and ours even loans ebooks.

There's not so many books I actually feel the need to own, certainly not fiction anyway.

Don't rule out the whole convenience factor when it comes to finding books too. Fine if you live in a town with a decent bookshop but many folk don't and you never know when you'll be somewhere, fancy a new book and be miles/hours from a bookshop.

And the “apples with oranges” comparison doesn’t help: the new books that are £6 on kindle just aren’t there for £2 second hand, yet.

The ones that are out there for cheap are often cheap/free for kindle.

I read a lot more now I have an eReader (although it's a Kobo, not a Kindle). Books on Amazon are regularly 99p or less. My library is signed up to Overdrive, as is the one where I used to live, and between them I can find most books that are on Amazon to borrow.

Physical print and distribution of a book makes up only a tiny fraction of the cost of book production

Do you have a figure for that? I haven't been able to find a generic number but other than marketing and design the "book creation process" outlined by Stross looks like mostly single person processes until you get to print and distribution. E-commerce storefronts and payment processing mechanisms won't be created exclusively for ebooks, they'll be shared with the physical product. And bandwidth and storage won't be a significant proportion of the cost charged - there'll be exceptions for non-fiction titles of course but a fiction title will typically be well under 1 Mb and customers will be using more bandwidth with a few pages of browsing the retailer's website.

Basic economics: price should be what the market will bear rather than cost+margin.

Sure, but while it's opportunistically high it will drive my purchasing towards the physical product more often than not. Then I can pass it on or resell after reading.

I haven't bought an actual fiction book since getting my kindle. I pick up a lot in the random sales they have. Usually have a couple I haven't read saved on the kindle

My one is pre paperwhite, if like to have the backlit screen as that would be a real boon

I still buy non fiction books though, I prefer actual books of in going to flick through them randomly and also like having a shelf of those books

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Pricing for ebooks is very dubious too, there’s usually little saving over a new paperback which strikes me as unrealistic when the whole physical production and inventory side of retail is being dispensed with.

A salient point.

Not really, if you consider your are paying for the content not the physicality.

Not really, if you consider your are paying for the content not the physicality.

But you are paying for it too. With an ebook they only have to send out the sold ones - with physical books they have make a punt as to how many they are going to sell and print that many and warehouse the rest before selling them all off for buttons to supermarkets etc. No such gambles in ebook land.

I wonder how many people get bought ebooks for Christmas. Even though I'm embedded in reading on a kindle myself i'm yet to give a gift of an ebook but every year I give loads of people physical books.

The library is free!

You can even get cycling weekly as a free e-magazine!!

I ordered 4 kindles from Amazon, they included a Two Ronnies DVD 🙂

Yet again, I have to recommend signing up to [url= https://www.bookbub.com/ebook-deals/recommended ]Book Bub[/url] - emails a list, in your chosen categories, of free/cheap Kindle books each day/week. Easy to stop.
Have had taken a few punts that have turned out fantastic, as well as books I've wanted that have gone on sale for 99p. When you follow a link to Amazon, there's always a list of other cheap books for the day.

I love physical books (and try to buy from our local bookshop whenever we're picking up a physical copy) but given most of my reading is done on the train an eReader makes far more sense. I used to live in the Kindle App on my phone but got a Kindle proper for Xmas. A far nicer experience (and far less tempted to hop between apps / check emails / get distracted etc).

Like a lot of people ^^ I often buy the bargain 99p reads but occasionally buy both a physical and digital copy of the same book; the wonderful Leonardo da Vinci biography by Walter Issacson being the latest. It's a really hefty book which is fine when I'm at home but there's no way I'm lugging it around.

I'd be happier buying eBooks if I thought it meant that the author was getting more ££ (given what intuition says should be far smaller overheads), but sadly I don't think this is the case. Arguably one active benefit has been a rise in self-publishers but I suspect this has been negated by the effect of Amazon on small booksellers and the publishing industry in general.

Our two teenage girls, who are both very technically minded, don't read any eBooks at all - they're avid readers but it's proper books all the way.

There are a few articles out there that say that authors sometimes get more or sometimes get less money per book depending on the publishing setup, so it's not cut and dried. But the question I have is are we reading more books overall in the age of e-readers? I certainly am.

As for advantages - the large print one mentioned above is a huge deal for many people. Also, I'm currently ploughing through a big non-fiction book which is a slow read. I own it in paper form but I re-bought it on Kindle because I was sick of lugging it about travelling to read a few pages a day.

Incidentally, it was something like £45 for three volumes in paperback, the Kindle version is about £6 per volume. I don't call that opportunistic pricing.

Funnily enough I was sub contracted by Harper Collins as part of a small team to produce paperback books for them in Glasgow.

Notwithstanding overheads he thought it cost us between 50p-£1 to produce most titles.

Personally for me, as a somewhat slow, and subsequently picky reader (since I'm investing a lot of time into it), the single biggest advantage is being able to pick pretty much any book at any time of day, and just delve into it. My time spent reading increased tenfold when I bought a Kindle.

The Paperwhites are really good for reading in low (or strong) light too.

Generally pay around £3-4 for a book through Amazon, but it's worth mentioning that it's not compulsory to buy through them...

I do like a paper book, and I think it's sad such things will slowly disappear... But it's that thing of convenience, in the same way we might lament the loss of our local butcher, even though we've done 99.9% of our shopping in Tesco for the past decade.

Yet again, I have to recommend signing up to Book Bub – emails a list, in your chosen categories, of free/cheap Kindle books each day/week. Easy to stop.
Have had taken a few punts that have turned out fantastic, as well as books I’ve wanted that have gone on sale for 99p. When you follow a link to Amazon, there’s always a list of other cheap books for the day.

Signed up, like it. But they keep emailing me links to US Amazon, which means I can't actually get the books they're emailing about. They come up correctly on the site.

I do like a paper book, and I think it’s sad such things will slowly disappear…

I occasionally see an article saying the opposite (quick link to The Guardian below.)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/14/ebook-sales-continue-to-fall-nielsen-survey-uk-book-sales

I love the kindle/ebook thing. If you are on the lookout for the latest release then yes the price can be a bit steep.

Take for example Mark Beaumont's Around the World in 80 days. At £9.99 that's too much in my eyes (however, back in the good old days I'd spend £6-8 on a proper book without batting an eyelid) but then you look at the recommended stuff and you start a little 5 month journey;

Hungry for Miles: Cycling across Europe on One Pound a Day - £1.99
Dare to Do: Taking on the planet by bike and boat - £0.99
The Pants Of Perspective: One Woman's 3,000 kilometre running adventure through the wilds of New Zealand - £5.99 (very rare I spend this much but the free sample got me hooked)
End to End: John O'Groats, Broken Spokes and a Dog called Gretna - £2.99
A Voyage For Madmen - £1.99 (solo/nonstop around the world race/golden globe)

And there is practically no wasted purchases as you can always read the first couple of chapters for free, and you can always see user reviews and ratings. Between the books above there have been two promising books that just didn't grab my attention and one recent release from a favourite author that I spend an evening or two reading and decided not to buy at the end of the sample.

I got a paper book for my birthday, right pain in the backside trying to read that, getting a dead arm in bed, dropping it on my face, losing my page, needing the bedside light on which annoys the wife!

Wife got me one for my birthday last July. Single best thing our money went towards last year. I now read every day and never used to. Gone through book after book.

Still read paper books if they're unavailable on the store. I also love the kindle stores refund policy - been a few times I've bought a book, tried it and decided it wasn't for me. I think if it's within 2 weeks you can get a full refund. Have done that with a few books.

Give it a proper shot. So handy, especially for traveling.

I had one and loved it when I was travelling all the time for work. It broke a couple of years ago and I've not bothered to replace it as I'm not away as much now. I tend to buy books in charity shops and I've always got a few in a pile waiting for me to get around too. If I were travelling again all the time I'd buy another straight away but for now I'm quite happy with paper. I'm also in a book group and those books all come from the library and I don't think they have an e option. Being in a book group also means people are always passing books they've enjoyed around. The one thing that I hadn't thought about before buying it was the in built dictionary, probably the only thing I currently miss.

I love my Kindle, it pretty much goes with me everywhere. I enjoy reading physical books a lot but I can travel much more easily with the Kindle (a few millimetres in a plane seat pocket vs. an inch), I can take loads of books with me and I can read every night whilst my partner sleeps with the Paperwhite back-light. Helps with sleeping too as I can progressively dim the back light. It syncs with my phone so I can read the same book on it if I unexpectedly have time to kill.

I appreciate and agree with all the anti-Kindle points above but this is one of the few devices that make me argue that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.

Repeating what others have said but:

1. Reading in bed without a light on annoying my Mrs is a definite advantage.
2. I have more room and everything in one place.
3. I’ve downloaded the kindle app to my phone so can pick up my ‘book’ when out and about, waiting around etc. My proper kindle then syncs to furthest page read so I can carry on as before
4. I rarely pay above £3-4 for a book. Loads are much cheaper, picked up loads for 99p recently, and not generic airport lounge novels, books I actually want to read. Classics often free or next to no cost (just read Heart of Darkness which was free for example)
5. The two independent book shops in my small devon town closed ages ago. So now it’s 16 miles to a Waterstones or I can browse and instantly purchase when I want something.

Still have a pile of paperbacks to read, about a dozen in a pile next to my bed, but prefer kindle unless it’s something special.

FYI

https://twitter.com/JohnSimpsonNews/status/1080846997056192512