Amazon browserizes Kindle book samples Amazon is calling upon its army of Kindle-based authors to help it in its battle for the eyeballs of the reading public. Its new weapon: Kindle for the Web. "Kindle for the Web is ... a great way for bloggers and authors to promote books on their websites by letting visitors read a chapter without leaving their site," said …
I am not concerned about my local bookstores, they never have what I want and if I want to order a book it seems I have to wait a month before they place an order. After the order is placed I can expect a wait of 2-6 weeks IF the publisher has it in stock.
With such excellent service I then started to use the internet but ebooks are far better for my needs. Efficient service, cheaper prices than paper copies I am spending more money now than I have done in years.
My local bookstore (Stoke Newington Bookshop) is very good, and if they don't have what I want, they'll get it in within 48 hours for me.
So, personally, I'd be very sad to see local bookshops disappear. I think it would be a shame if the only way of buying certain types of material (gay, political, and plenty of others, I'm sure) was by handing over credit card, name and address details to a large company.
Me too - although my impression of all of the book readers so far is that they are a pain in the ass and the experience of using them is nothing like reading a book. Perhaps I don't have Naomi's eye but so far throwing a kindle at a cockroach has not had the same effect as throwing a copy of Castaneda's "Journey to Ixtlan"
Reading on a Kindle is like watching porn instead of having sex.
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If scripts are turned off, wouldn't it be easier (and more accessible) to give the link to the page containing all the text? Then screen readers will work well with it and one can use the normal browser controls to set the font size etc.?
Not hard to find the page it's pointing to:
http://kindleweb.s3.amazonaws.com/content/B003EJDGBO/gz_sample.html
It's tempting to suggest the embedding thing is a bit pointless when a link would do, but then you'd lose the referral facility, so maybe it does add something and keeps readers on the page even if it does use iframes.
Amazon is far from the first to do this (there are numerous online bookstores that offer excerpts), but somehow it's the company offering the most bulletproof consumer-lock-in that gets the kudos. I guess this is partly because their marketing is more effective, and partly because they spend a lot of R&D money on features that can persuade users to be locked in...
Bit like an iPhone
I wonder if consumer disinterest will eventually kill open standards.
Nice to see that someone else has finally worked out that being able to take a look at a book before you buy it would be helpful, and would result in more sales. Of course, Baen books, who pioneered ebook sales, have been doing this for over a decade now, letting you read the first quarter of each book before you buy it, and doing very well out of it (because if you are still reading a book by that far in, you WILL buy it).
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