Panelist

[JonP]

Reminds me of Paul Merton's criticism of Madonna's book "Sex" that it was too heavy to hold in one hand.

[Grillmeat]

delph_ambi said: 

*wonders what the arm under the blanket is doing*   

I tried really hard not to go there........

[Pharosian]

I have already downloaded over $300 worth of books for free.

One question; how exactly does $300 equate to free? Is there some mechanism, via the purchase of a Kindle, that the authors get remuneration for their efforts? Or is the Kindle the contemporary equivalent to an MP3 player? I.e. the source doesn't matter as long as the format's right; the artists can go screw themselves.

I don't doubt there are a lot of people who relish the idea of "free". But as soon as their work is included they will turn hypocrite.

I presume that Amazon is either acting in agreement with the authors and their agents, or maybe they are eating the cost and still paying the author for the copies but simply not charging the people who download them. Oftentimes the free downloads are only available for a limited time: a few days to a month.

To answer your question, I based my figure of $300 on the "Digital List Price" quoted for each book I downloaded. A book that is usually sold in the store as a paperback might be listed as $5.99 for example; a hardback is usually $9.99, though sometimes they can be higher for some reason.

As I said, the way it usually works is that an author of multiple books has "Book 1" (whatever that is) offered for free download. Obviously if there are multiple books in a series, Book 1 was probably published a few years ago, and may not be generating much in the way of current sales, anyway. The free offering gets a new group of readers interested, who then purchase copies of books 2-n, which would otherwise might not have been purchased at all, had the reader not had the opportunity to sample the first book for free.

For example, one of my free downloads was Red Mars. If I like it, I will most likely buy Green Mars and Blue Mars. I've known about this trilogy for ages, but never got around to buying them from the Science Fiction Book Club when they were offered years ago, nor off the shelf of the local bookstore. After all this time, it's really no skin off the author's nose to let me read Red Mars for free, as I haven't made a move to buy it in all this time and could easily check it out of the library. Apparently Amazon has quite a pile of research to show that people who have Kindles actually buy more books than they did before they had them.

Another category that seems to be offering lots of free downloads is romance books. I'm not sure what the rationale is there, as I don't follow the genre to know if the plan is to build a reader base for the various authors or whether they can't sell them at a higher price.

[antimuffin]

test

I'm a real page-man myself. Can't get into reading off computer screens. But the new gen is into all kinds of electronical methods--kindles and itouches. That's sort of a wizardry in itself, you know?

[Dragoro]

I love my kindle. And while it does cost 300 to buy, it more then makes up for its cost with all the free books (10s of thousands of free classics plus monthly give aways by amazon). Not to mention that you can get new releases way cheaper on the kindle then ya can in paper form.

[Dragoro]

Sony readers can be read in bright sunlight, unlike most laptops.

I agree that ebooks don't speed up the reading though getting hold of the novel / textbook could be in minutes rather than days. I would still prefer to linger over the read.

In the far future (ie more than 10 years) we may be able to download novels, films, etc directly to a section of our brain and so dispense entirely with gadgets such as paper or readers, sillly helmets etc. Even so, we would want to take our time to savour favourite authors when accessing them within a neural web.

Geoff

It does speed up the reading in a way. I sure read a lot lot more books since Ive gotten my kindle.

[Geoff_N]

Yep, it looks like the Kindle may be very good for small press too. At Adventure Books of Seattle we've found a definite uptick in sales of our Escape Velocity mag and some novels once we placed them at Kindle. See
http://www.adventurebooksofseattle.com/titlesforkindlereader.htm