Amazon cuts cost of Kindle If you’re yet to make the jump from paper books to electronic displays Amazon has an incentive: a Kindle price cut. The online retailer has reduced the device’s price by $60 (£37/€42) to $299 (£185/€214). Sadly, Amazon hasn’t trimmed the fee of its other, newer Kindle model, the DX, which remains a pricier $489 (£302/€350). A …
Then I might be interested, seems there are too many people out there with too much money to burn to make Amazon think seriously about competing. They have the "unique product, unique price" attitude that is prevalent amongst some manufacturers, I'm sure we can all put the names to them.
It seems to me that Amazon are going to have a hard time releasing the Kindle in Europe - though I'd be happy to be proved wrong.
Euro telcos have seen how successful the Kindle is in the US, and the bandwidth requirement of the supporting network. It wouldn't be at all suprising if they tried to regain the ground lost to the iPhone and Kindle by releasing their own-brand e-books here (with appropriate service contract, kerching!!).
In the mean time they are protected from Amazon by the byzantine publisher's agreements and tortuous relationships between the various 'national' telcos. That alone will continue to delay introduction of the Kindle. The prospect of a device under their own control would hardly encourage them to come to some agreement with Amazon.
"I prefer the feel of a paper book" is usually the argument used by people who have never used one of the latest e-ink based ebooks. It really is just as nice to read a book from a Sony Reader as it is to read from a paper book. I've not used a Kindle, but I'm guessing they're similar.
My Sony Reader came with 100 books. 100 books at €7.50 each would have cost a lot more than my Sony Reader cost.
Your Sony Reader may have come with 100 books, but are they 100 books you want to read? I bought a Bookeen Cybook 3 in Jan 2008 and it came with a bundle of books as well... not read any of them.
Fortunately Baen have 100s of free books that I do read :-)
However, for me, the big problem is the pricing of new books. I'm not paying as much for a DRM'd ebook as it costs for the dead tree edition. Well, I won't pay for DRM at all 'cos if the Cybook dies then I'm SOL. But even without DRM the prices should be lower. I still like seeing the dead tree on my shelves; I'd willingly pay a $2 surcharge to get dead-tree PLUS DRM-free ebook.
'Just bought 'Digital Fortress'
I don't know what these other guys are talking about. I think it was Dan Brown's best comedy. The funniest part was where he thought that a 16-bit encryption key was a sequence of 16 ascii characters. Why look up the word 'bit' when it's FAR more entertaining to make up your own definition?
I would consider the kindle if the cost of the books was far lower than the cost of the corresponding hard copies. It isn't.
I thought the best bit was when the NRO's head security nerd couldn't be reached for a desperate emergency because he had his head in a mainframe fixing it with a soldering iron and let his mobile go to voicemail.
From an e-book perspective, there are a ton of free books out there that are actually well worth reading, and if you like classics they can justify an e-reader on their own. Actual commercial releases can be a real con, sometimes costing as much as a paperback.
Dan Brown books would be poor value for money if they were free. I actually read all three when stuck in Wales with nothing else, and I fear my IQ has been permanently lowered as a result. They're a bit like the Jeremy Kyle show in book form.
Yeah, I've read about half a dozen of them so far. There's probably another couple of dozen of them that I'll read.
I can understand that people think the price of e-books is currently too high, but you can't really say they're too high when comparing them to normal books. After all, e-books aren't *more* expensive than normal books.
You might feel like you're getting better value for money when you buy something physical than when you buy something in digital form, but you're not.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
