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iBook store vs Kindle Store - Price and Availability
- Thread starter Eric-PTEK
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wait a minute..$27.99 for a book and $5 for a magazine??
you are kidding...right?
only an imbecile would pay those prices for that.
FAIL
Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?
At a penny Ayn Rand is overpriced. Actually, I think the publisher has a study showing that anyone foolish enough to buy her philosophy is foolish enough to pay an exorbitant price for one of her books.
The connection with innovative syntax, though, is still being studied.
Ayn Rand is brillant, but those prices are way too high. 90% of the people that don't like her aren't the sort of people who are even interested in another's point of view, especially when it threatens their cushy way of life. They'll just dismiss anything of the sort.
Can't see the iBook store here in the UK yet. But I think if it has 60,000 books then it will have a problem.
The Amazon Kindle store has of the order of 400,000 - and I find it quite hard to find anything to read.
If you want the latest bestseller it's OK - as long as you are willing to wait for the paperback release, 6-12 months after the hardback. New releases rarely come to Kindle, the publishers are sticking to charging hardback prices and moving physical product to the fans of established novelists. I imagine that even with the cost of producing lumps of dead trees they are still quids in (American: rolling in dollars?) with hardback launches.
If you want The Bard, Dickens - anything old and classic really, it is there and it is quite cheap. A couple of dollars for all of Shakespeare's work - not bad.
It is the stuff in the middle that is missing. I don't want to read the latest Vampire novel, Dan sodding Brown or whatever has replaced Barbara Cartland and Jilly Cooper nowadays. Even if I did, I'd not be happy about waiting 8 months. Anything a little bit quirky - Murakami, Kurkov - not there.
OK. Let us assume that I should judge the Kindle store by American-Centric standards. John Irving - nothing. Not even The World According to Garp. Paul Auster - 7. Not bad, but not his best 7. And less than half his total. Salinger. The Catcher in the Rye isn't there - nor the three Glass novellas. Kerouac? - The latest one only. On The Road is not even there. ****!
Terrible.
OK - let's go for the kind of book the aware technogeek might go look for. Williams Gibson. Five. FIVE??? And the he latest five as well. No Neuromancer. Who launches an on-line boostore and doesn't have the original cyberpunk classic?
Technical books are sparse. Some of the very worst of the latest cult management theories.
The problem is - if you walked into a real physical bookstore that had the same stock as the Kindle store for a quick browse, you'd be leaving two minutes later assuming they were at the end of their closing down sale - with some stacks of last years best sellers and a well stocked non-moving classics section and little else on show.
OK. Hypothetical utopian future...
- When the publishers realise that very soon everyone will be reading on tablets and e-readers they will get their act together and release new books sensibly online. Doing otherwise will become like releasing the latest series of Heroes on VHS only for sixth months before sticking it on iTunes. Good news for the publisher because the buyer pays all the raw material costs and pays for the distribution in bandwidth.
- Anyone can become a publisher. Like anyone can get a DevKit and write an App. So - not a guarantee of success. You could write a **** App, you could sign some crap authors. But many people could make it into "print" - especially good when publishers are trying to get authors to make carbon copies of their bestsellers and create carbon copies of authors, and when bookstores make them do that to move product. Does make reviewing and critics interesting. No pre-publish crap filter at the publisher. But also no dumbing down of the market place.
Needs some work. Publisher deals, some concept of the back catalogue being relevant. If you want to be a bookshop, you need to be a bookshop. The current iTunes stores can just a bout get away with only having recent music, recent films and the indisputable classics. You can't do this with a bookshop and be taken seriously.
The Amazon Kindle store has of the order of 400,000 - and I find it quite hard to find anything to read.
If you want the latest bestseller it's OK - as long as you are willing to wait for the paperback release, 6-12 months after the hardback. New releases rarely come to Kindle, the publishers are sticking to charging hardback prices and moving physical product to the fans of established novelists. I imagine that even with the cost of producing lumps of dead trees they are still quids in (American: rolling in dollars?) with hardback launches.
If you want The Bard, Dickens - anything old and classic really, it is there and it is quite cheap. A couple of dollars for all of Shakespeare's work - not bad.
It is the stuff in the middle that is missing. I don't want to read the latest Vampire novel, Dan sodding Brown or whatever has replaced Barbara Cartland and Jilly Cooper nowadays. Even if I did, I'd not be happy about waiting 8 months. Anything a little bit quirky - Murakami, Kurkov - not there.
OK. Let us assume that I should judge the Kindle store by American-Centric standards. John Irving - nothing. Not even The World According to Garp. Paul Auster - 7. Not bad, but not his best 7. And less than half his total. Salinger. The Catcher in the Rye isn't there - nor the three Glass novellas. Kerouac? - The latest one only. On The Road is not even there. ****!
Terrible.
OK - let's go for the kind of book the aware technogeek might go look for. Williams Gibson. Five. FIVE??? And the he latest five as well. No Neuromancer. Who launches an on-line boostore and doesn't have the original cyberpunk classic?
Technical books are sparse. Some of the very worst of the latest cult management theories.
The problem is - if you walked into a real physical bookstore that had the same stock as the Kindle store for a quick browse, you'd be leaving two minutes later assuming they were at the end of their closing down sale - with some stacks of last years best sellers and a well stocked non-moving classics section and little else on show.
OK. Hypothetical utopian future...
- When the publishers realise that very soon everyone will be reading on tablets and e-readers they will get their act together and release new books sensibly online. Doing otherwise will become like releasing the latest series of Heroes on VHS only for sixth months before sticking it on iTunes. Good news for the publisher because the buyer pays all the raw material costs and pays for the distribution in bandwidth.
- Anyone can become a publisher. Like anyone can get a DevKit and write an App. So - not a guarantee of success. You could write a **** App, you could sign some crap authors. But many people could make it into "print" - especially good when publishers are trying to get authors to make carbon copies of their bestsellers and create carbon copies of authors, and when bookstores make them do that to move product. Does make reviewing and critics interesting. No pre-publish crap filter at the publisher. But also no dumbing down of the market place.
Needs some work. Publisher deals, some concept of the back catalogue being relevant. If you want to be a bookshop, you need to be a bookshop. The current iTunes stores can just a bout get away with only having recent music, recent films and the indisputable classics. You can't do this with a bookshop and be taken seriously.
I'm sure I saw OS4 has the iBook and it will sync with the iPad version so both know what page you're on. I'm certainly looking forward to that too.
Yeah. I should learn to subsist on a diet of Dan Brown, The Twilight Saga, the novel of the latest blockbuster AVATAR and maybe some Superman comics. I mean, what can we really learn from reading the literature of other cultures? I should probably stop watching films with subtitles and be happy about Ironman 2. Mozart - pah! Too many notes. I'll go for a supersized bacon double cheese and a lobotomy to go. I'll be happy when I'm dribbling.... ...I'm a barbie girl, in a barbie world....
iBook availability
I sure hope Random House gets it's act together and starts selling on iBooks. As an avid reader my major disappointment is that quite a few of my favorite authors are missing. I'm trying to avoid buying books on multiple apps until someone develops a way to have them appear in a single reader.
I sure hope Random House gets it's act together and starts selling on iBooks. As an avid reader my major disappointment is that quite a few of my favorite authors are missing. I'm trying to avoid buying books on multiple apps until someone develops a way to have them appear in a single reader.
Hmmm. The Kindle store claims to have 378,000 titles. BUT - some of those are the same book. OK, having (say) Madame Bovary and the complete works of Flaubert (for instance) is excusable. But there are five versions of H G Wells - The Island of Dr Moreau, eight of The War in the Air. Plus a numbers of "doubles" and a couple of complete works.
OK - any bookshop will have multiple versions of some works, but not that many I think. Seems to be rife in the "classics" section.
Amazon has c30,000,000 titles listed in "books" - but who knows how many it has current stock of. The beauty of the ebook is you never go out of stock once you have it once - so eventually it ought to get quite good.
OK - any bookshop will have multiple versions of some works, but not that many I think. Seems to be rife in the "classics" section.
Amazon has c30,000,000 titles listed in "books" - but who knows how many it has current stock of. The beauty of the ebook is you never go out of stock once you have it once - so eventually it ought to get quite good.
You probably know by now but in case others don't...
iPhones will be able to read iBooks in the upcoming OS 4.0 as it will give iPhone users (and iPod Touch users) the iBookstore app. Note: I think only 2nd and 3rd gen iPhones and iPod Touch devices will be able to upgrade to OS 4.0, with multitasking only with 3rd gen).