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On Buying a Kindle
Dec. 16th, 2011 04:57 pmI have decided to acquire a Kindle.
I’ve been experimenting with the Kindle app on my iPhone. I’ve read about half a dozen books on it so far and I’ve found them perfectly okay to read.
I’ve checked the availability and price of Kindle ebooks on Amazon and the prices are okay.
Most of the books I would want to buy are at least a little cheaper as an ebook. The difference becomes more marked if you have to pay for postage and packing. There looks to be perhaps a couple of pounds saving per book on average. The discount seems a fair trade for the loss of resale value and the loss of the ability to lend books to other people.
At about £90 for the Kindle I think it will take about 50 books to be break even. So that’s a book a week for a year. Assuming a 3 year life for the Kindle machine and I’ll be about £200 up on the deal; or between 20 and 40 books.
This is before I factor in the availability of free books from places like Project Guttenberg (for all your out of copyright classic book needs). I do tend to read things like Aristotle or Machiavelli so having access to those texts for free makes the number of books to break even much more favourable. At £9 per paperback version I’d only need to read ten Project Guttenberg books before the Kindle had paid for itself.
I’ve also downloaded some books from Baen’s Free Library. I quite like the idea of the Baen Free Library. It gives me an opportunity to try books by authors I would never risk a tenner. If I love the book then I can buy the rest of their work. If I don’t, then I’ve only lost the time to read the first few chapters.
The Kindle also helps me to defer buying a new bookcase at £90. My bookcases are pretty much full at the moment and in about a year or two I’ll need to either box up a whole bunch of books or buy some more bookcases. With more books in ebook form I can put this purchase off for sometime. Thus the Kindle handily pays for itself twice over the next year or so. Furthermore, it helps me avoid the £50 grand I’d have to pay in about five years to buy a bigger house to house my books if I continue to buy them at the same rate as I currently do.
I’m mindful of the risks associated with buying ebooks from Amazon. They have some form for deliberately deleting books. I suspect I’m unlikely to be buying the kind of books that Amazon might take issue with. As a moral consideration it irks but as a commercial risk it’s okay for me. They also have some form for accidentally deleting people’s libraries. The internet suggests that they are reasonably good about fixing these problems when they occur. Again, a commercial risk I’m willing to take. I could easily lose all my hardcopy books in a leaking pipe disaster, or as I have in the past, through the fruitcake actions of a person I trusted my books with. There are no risk free scenarios. You pays your money and you takes your choice.
There are longer term issues about Digital Rights Managed file formats. What happens if Amazon goes bust or decides they can’t be bothered maintaining the Kindle format. In the latter case they get sued until either they do or they go bust. In the former, well, I guess we’ll see. Having those files unlocked strikes me as a service people would be willing to pay for and therefore the basis of an asset the liquidators could sell.
In any event, I tend not to re-read fiction. If I am careful and ensure that I buy hardcopy or DRM free ebooks (not via the Kindle) for anything I’d want to refer to in the future, text books and the like, the risk that Amazon go south with my library is one I’m willing to risk for the convenience of
The final concern with Amazon is what happens when my Kindle wears out and I don’t want to replace it with a Kindle but with some other system and I can’t port my purchases across. I think the same points on re-reading books apply here as they do above. I’m also expecting some anti-trust anti-competitive practise action on incompatible file formats in the next few years once the EU wakes up to way the market is being corralled by Amazon. I’m also expecting the price of ebook readers to fall to the point where having two is not prohibitive. Admittedly, it somewhat misses the point to have two ebook readers but then I already have about a thousand books and I seem to be able to make that work.
So, let the great Kindle experiment commence.
I’ve been experimenting with the Kindle app on my iPhone. I’ve read about half a dozen books on it so far and I’ve found them perfectly okay to read.
I’ve checked the availability and price of Kindle ebooks on Amazon and the prices are okay.
Most of the books I would want to buy are at least a little cheaper as an ebook. The difference becomes more marked if you have to pay for postage and packing. There looks to be perhaps a couple of pounds saving per book on average. The discount seems a fair trade for the loss of resale value and the loss of the ability to lend books to other people.
At about £90 for the Kindle I think it will take about 50 books to be break even. So that’s a book a week for a year. Assuming a 3 year life for the Kindle machine and I’ll be about £200 up on the deal; or between 20 and 40 books.
This is before I factor in the availability of free books from places like Project Guttenberg (for all your out of copyright classic book needs). I do tend to read things like Aristotle or Machiavelli so having access to those texts for free makes the number of books to break even much more favourable. At £9 per paperback version I’d only need to read ten Project Guttenberg books before the Kindle had paid for itself.
I’ve also downloaded some books from Baen’s Free Library. I quite like the idea of the Baen Free Library. It gives me an opportunity to try books by authors I would never risk a tenner. If I love the book then I can buy the rest of their work. If I don’t, then I’ve only lost the time to read the first few chapters.
The Kindle also helps me to defer buying a new bookcase at £90. My bookcases are pretty much full at the moment and in about a year or two I’ll need to either box up a whole bunch of books or buy some more bookcases. With more books in ebook form I can put this purchase off for sometime. Thus the Kindle handily pays for itself twice over the next year or so. Furthermore, it helps me avoid the £50 grand I’d have to pay in about five years to buy a bigger house to house my books if I continue to buy them at the same rate as I currently do.
I’m mindful of the risks associated with buying ebooks from Amazon. They have some form for deliberately deleting books. I suspect I’m unlikely to be buying the kind of books that Amazon might take issue with. As a moral consideration it irks but as a commercial risk it’s okay for me. They also have some form for accidentally deleting people’s libraries. The internet suggests that they are reasonably good about fixing these problems when they occur. Again, a commercial risk I’m willing to take. I could easily lose all my hardcopy books in a leaking pipe disaster, or as I have in the past, through the fruitcake actions of a person I trusted my books with. There are no risk free scenarios. You pays your money and you takes your choice.
There are longer term issues about Digital Rights Managed file formats. What happens if Amazon goes bust or decides they can’t be bothered maintaining the Kindle format. In the latter case they get sued until either they do or they go bust. In the former, well, I guess we’ll see. Having those files unlocked strikes me as a service people would be willing to pay for and therefore the basis of an asset the liquidators could sell.
In any event, I tend not to re-read fiction. If I am careful and ensure that I buy hardcopy or DRM free ebooks (not via the Kindle) for anything I’d want to refer to in the future, text books and the like, the risk that Amazon go south with my library is one I’m willing to risk for the convenience of
The final concern with Amazon is what happens when my Kindle wears out and I don’t want to replace it with a Kindle but with some other system and I can’t port my purchases across. I think the same points on re-reading books apply here as they do above. I’m also expecting some anti-trust anti-competitive practise action on incompatible file formats in the next few years once the EU wakes up to way the market is being corralled by Amazon. I’m also expecting the price of ebook readers to fall to the point where having two is not prohibitive. Admittedly, it somewhat misses the point to have two ebook readers but then I already have about a thousand books and I seem to be able to make that work.
So, let the great Kindle experiment commence.
