Ahira's Hangar

Well, thanks for the info guys. I did a little research and agree that the Kindle is not the way to go. And the MyVu is a little bit beyond me!

I never considered a pda Ted. Makes so much sense though. I just assumed that a larger, bookish-sized reader was the way to go. You make a valid argument for the compact pocket pc. I'm definitely going to check them out.

I got mine 4 or 5 years ago (an asus), and it's still going strong. I'd check out or to get an idea of what's available nowadays. A lot of the newer ones are pretty complex; they've got phones, cameras and gps's bundled together. That's probably more than I'd want myself, if I had to buy a new one today. I'm not entirely sure if anything like what I have exists anymore, to be honest.

With the they just made to the Sony Reader it might be the way to go - as long as you use a PC and not a Mac.

I looked at the Sony Reader at Borders a month or two ago. It's shiny.

My only concern is whether all the books I want to read would be available in a compatible format. You get a blue billion classic titles as a freebie with your purchase, if you get it from Borders, but I haven't fully investigated how many of those titles are books I'd like to have. Mainly because I'm not yet seriously in the market for one.

The ex-hubby reads books on his PDA. Seems to work fine for him. I think I'd like the bigger screen of a Sony Reader or a Kindle, tho. (Will have to look on the previous page to see why folks are not recommending the Kindle...)

Edit: Oh, yeah, because you have to buy your books from Amazon. Meh. I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon anyhow, so that's not a huge drawback to me.

And yeah, I can see the appeal for traveling. The Sony Reader maybe the same size/shape as a book, but it's much thinner and lighter. It would've been great to take to Spain.

Book availability is probably the biggest drawback; there's no way you can just read e-books and be satisfied, imo. A lot of authors just don't have their books out in the format. Erikson's books aren't available generally, except Reaper's Gale, which is out in Kindle format. The annoying thing about Amazon is that they seem to have an excusive deal with some authors (or maybe publishers), and I think once they start putting out the Kindle books, they don't become available in mobi or ereader or the other formats if they weren't to begin with. That totallys sucks, but I guess it's a good incentive to get a Kindle. Also, the Kindle prices are better; I think that the max price for a book is 10 bucks. Some books, like Fatal Revenant, cost $25 from the other sources, but are $10 from Amazon. That's also annoying as hell. I haven't read FR yet just because there is no way in hell I'm paying 25 bucks for an e-book.

It's bizarre how some books in a series are available as an e-book, and others aren't. Usually, there's not a pattern. Maybe 6 of 9 (or however many are in the series) Dresden Files books are available; there are many more examples. Some authors don't have their old books available (like Donaldson, except some of his mysteries-which is weird), but other authors have all of their back catalogue available. Tor is weird as hell. They've given away ~30 books this year (mostly the first in a trilogy/series), but they don't actually sell e-books. So if you read one of their free ones (I've just read Spin and Old Man's War), you've got to buy the paper books to continue reading the series. Apparently they don't have plans to start selling e-books, either (I guess they may sell through Amazon, though). Dumb as hell, if you ask me.

Here are some well represented SFF authors off the top of my head:

GRRM
CJ Cherryh (she has 30+ books available)
Stephen King (too bad I don't like him)
Robin Hobb (all of her books, except the Lindholm ones)
Neal Stephenson
CS Friedman
Lois McMaster Bujold
Fritz Leiber
Raymond Feist (everything but the first damn Riftwar Series, which is the only damn one I want to read!)
Richard Morgan
JV Jones
Walter Jon Williams
Kim Stanley Robinson (too bad I hated Red Mars)
Terry Brooks

Conspicuously absent:
Tad Williams (War of the Flowers is the only one)
Steven Erikson (yeah, no one wants to be able to do a quick search through a book 4 books earlier in the series to see who in the hell Dessimbell-whozit is.)
David Brin
Roger Zelazny (they used to have several of his books available, including Damnation Alley, but now they don't. Go figure; I was planning on buying DA, but now I'll have to get a crappy, used 30 year old paper back for 5 cents and 4 bucks shipping. Thanks, dill-weeds!)
Connie Willis
Iain Banks
R Scott Bakker
Terry Goodkind (eh, who cares?)

I really find it weird when a newer author like Bakker doesn't sell e-books. Why the hell not? You can't possibly lose money that way, can you?

I don't think it's the authors -- I think it's the publishers who are dragging their feet on releasing books in the e-book formats. SRD talked about the problem with audio books -- iirc, his original publisher, Ballantine, didn't want to release the rights for audio books without getting a boatload of money for it -- and I suspect e-books are the same deal.

As for the free books Tor gives out -- that makes perfect sense from a marketing standpoint. They give you a free e-book of the first book in the series to reel you in, so that you'll want to buy the rest of the series in the dead-tree version.

I agree with you that $25 seems like a lot for an e-book. They must be making money like crazy off that price, given that dead-tree volumes don't cost that much more, and they don't have to pay for paper/printing/shipping/warehouse space/etc. for an e-book.

Wow...

The only e-books I have dealt with is Dragonlily's company, , for Xar's and Iquestor's stories. From what I see, their most expensive books are $4.00. I had no idea some publishers are charging $25.00 for e-books.

I have been seeing a lot of complaints at Amazon lately from customers saying that kindle books cost more than new release hardcovers. Now granted - a lot of new release hardcovers from popular authors have big discounts - but still.

They do however, from what I understand, offer an occasional free book (often a romance novel) for the kindle.

I suppose the publishers have to recoup the cost of hardware/software tooling up and whatnot, too. I suspect they're not selling a *lot* of e-books right now, so it would be hard to recoup startup costs on volume alone.

Still...if the dead-tree version is on sale, the price should be the same for the e-book. Presumably they already have the galleys in an electronic version -- it would be just a matter of saving the final galleys in the e-book format. It's not like an audio book, where they have to hire a producer and talent, and then duplicate and distribute the CDs. But I acknowledge that e-book production may be more complicated than I think it is....

I don't think it's that hard at all. I've converted a few online books to e-books myself, and it wasn't that big of a deal (e.g. Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End was available free as html a while ago). Mobipocket has free software for converting html, word and pdf's into e-books, and it's pretty simple. I didnt' bother with making a linked table of contents or anything fancy like that, but I'm sure that it's got to be pretty easy to do. I couldn't take more than a few hours if you knew what you were doing (which I didn't, but it still worked).

FYI, there's a massive sale on e-books from fictionwise (and booksonboard, maybe others) through this sunday. Everything is 50% off. Guess I'll finally pick up FR.

Edit: It's not a straight 50% off-you get 50% back to spend towards other books, or something like that.

I am remiss in not reporting here that I am now the proud owner of a Sony Reader.

I received an Amazon gift certificate at the holidays from my attorneys, so I popped over to Amazon and ordered a Kindle -- only to discover it was backordered for 8 to 10 weeks. At the time, I was willing to wait. But about a month later, I found out there was a chance I would be sent to India for work (the chance fizzled out, but anyway). So I went to Amazon to see if the shipping date had been moved up any. It hadn't -- but Amazon helpfully suggested to me that I might be interested in buying the Sony from one of their third-party vendors. And it was in stock. So I cancelled the Kindle order and got the Sony instead.

I like the Reader very much. The screen is easy to read, and you can change the font size easily (for those of us with aging eyes ). Plus you can hold it *and* turn the pages with just one hand, which is critical when you have a cat perched on your shoulder and must support said cat's butt with your other hand. (Not that this ever happens to me...)

I've recently had a chance to compare the Sony with the next-generation Kindle. The Kindle has a smaller screen, thanks to its keyboard, which is necessary for downloading stuff from the Kindle Store. The Kindle has a search function which the Reader lacks. There are also magazine and newspaper subscriptions available for the Kindle, which would be nice for the Reader as well.

The concept of downloading books directly to the Kindle is okay, but having to route everything through my computer onto the Reader hasn't been a big deal for me. One nice plus to the Reader's lack of wi-fi: I had no trouble using my Reader during takeoff and landing on our recent trip to Denver. I'm sure it would've been a different story if I'd been using a Kindle.

Anyway, the only thing I wish the Reader had that it doesn't have is a search function. And, yeah, a bigger selection of available titles. (Tho I haven't done much investigating into what's available elsewhere than the Sony Store.) I wouldn't have bought it without the gift certificate, but I'm glad now that I have it.

From what I understand, Ali, there are some free programs out there that will convert any regular ebook to Sony Reader format - so you can download the books from the Tor website, or the Random House website, or Joy's company website, or the Project Gutenberg (great source for the classics) and use the free programs to make the books compatible with your Reader.

One of the reasons why I would go for a Sony rather than a Kindle, if I had the spare money for either.

Good to know about the free software, Duchess, thanks!

The Reader will also accept a regular .pdf file -- which I believe was not the case with the original Kindle, tho I think you can do it with the Kindle 2. So yeah, I could download .pdfs from Joy's site (or any other .pdf from anywhere) and read them on my Reader.

Got an e-mail from Sony yesterday that they've now got a deal with Google Books. Apparently you can get any Google Book, reformatted in the Reader's native format, for free. That expands the titles available on the Reader by, like, thousands. We're still talking about a great, gaping hole of availability, as all the Google Books are out of copyright, by definition, and of course there are a whole lot of copyright-protected books that aren't available in e-format. But we're making progress...