You all do know that the Kindle also accepts unprotected MOBI books? They look just like the Amazon books. Alot of sites have these. You just have to load them thru your computer rather than letting Amazon send them to you. I keep a copy of all my unprotected MOBI books on my computer and load as I want.
Lifetimer
2002 Dodge Ram 1500
2012 Rockwood Roo 23SS
Family of 3, Furbaby "Hope"
Seymour, TN
Libertarian wrote: The main thing I don't like about ebooks is that they usually are not significantly cheaper than buying the actual book...
That's another reason I cut off the spines and scan books. It's usually much less expensive to buy used dead tree books than to buy e-books (the exception are classics published before roughly the twenties or thirties). Also, many books are not available in e-book form.
I can't imagine spending my time destroying print books and scanning them when there are thousands of current in print books legally available for free in e-book formats. Even Amazon.com usually has a couple hundred of them available at any given time. Of the several hundred books I have stored on my tablet and notebook, there's only a dozen or so I paid for, and most of those were in the $1 to $4 range. And of course there's always the public libraries that have e-books you can check out for a couple of weeks at a time. It's rare that I can't find a given book in an e-book format somewhere.
We had a "lawyer's bookcase" custom made for our fivers. It had locking glass doors and adjustable shelves. It held all the books we felt necessary to have. As for reading material...novels, etc, we used paperbacks and swapped them out at used bookstores, etc.
The bookcase was about 30x10 by 30 high and sat against the side of the l r slide under a window
Dianne (and Terry) (Fulltimed for 9 years)
Donnelly, ID
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2009 Lance 971 Truck Camper, loaded
Life Member Good Sam
Geocache..."RVcachers" RV net Blog
Pawz4me wrote: ...E-book prices may start to fall soon. The DOJ has filed suit against Apple and some of the top publishers for colluding to keep the price of e-books high via the "agency model."
While IMO e-books were never as inexpensive as they should be, they were significantly less inexpensive before Apple got involved. One of many reasons I'll never be an Apple fan.
Apple's walled garden has been one of the reasons I will not buy Apple products for quite some time. I also won't buy into Amazon's Kindle walled garden either.
Apple started the agency pricing B.S. but publishers bought into it wholesale. They try to tell us that the cost of printing, shipping, warehousing, and retailing dead tree books is only a tiny fraction of the total cost of the books and that it is too labor intensive to make e-books. I just cannot believe that the physical costs of dead tree books is only a tiny fraction of the cost of a book. More likely, publishers don't want to absorb the cost of dismantling the physical infrastructure that is already in place.
As far as making e-books being more labor intensive than making dead tree books is concerned, that has to be pure hogwash. They receive the original manuscript in an electronic format already. It's no more labor to format it to e-book form than it is to format it to a print ready format. They have software that will do most of the labor for them automatically.
The only time it costs more to make an e-book is when a book has to be scanned, OCRed, edited to correct scan and OCR errors, then converted to an e-book format. If publishers had had the good sense to keep the original electronic manuscripts, they wouldn't have to deal with that. Even that would be less expensive if the industry would drop DRM and and settle on a single e-book standard instead of having a variety of e-book standards infested with DRM that makes any format essentially proprietary.
Libertarian wrote: The main thing I don't like about ebooks is that they usually are not significantly cheaper than buying the actual book...
That's another reason I cut off the spines and scan books. It's usually much less expensive to buy used dead tree books than to buy e-books (the exception are classics published before roughly the twenties or thirties). Also, many books are not available in e-book form.
I can't imagine spending my time destroying print books and scanning them when there are thousands of current in print books legally available for free in e-book formats. Even Amazon.com usually has a couple hundred of them available at any given time. Of the several hundred books I have stored on my tablet and notebook, there's only a dozen or so I paid for, and most of those were in the $1 to $4 range. And of course there's always the public libraries that have e-books you can check out for a couple of weeks at a time. It's rare that I can't find a given book in an e-book format somewhere.
I don't bother to scan classics that are in the public domain when an e-book is available for free. I download the e-book and give it a cursory examination to make sure it's a good version (many are poorly edited scans) then, if I have a dead tree version, I use it for trading stock at the used bookstore I haunt.
I will also buy new books I don't already have if they are available in a non-DRM infested version. However, replacing books I already have at the rate of $1-$4 each would be prohibitively expensive since I have between 1500 and 2000 books. Scanning them is much less expensive. Also, many, if not most, of the books I have are not available legally in e-book format.
garyhaupt wrote: Much of this is about getting rid of stuff, or 'letting go'. Books are a great source of comfort and emotional attachments. A person might stuff the important ones in a box, now and then, and mail them off, keeping the really good ones, of course.
If it's just about books..I buy at used stores, read and give away. Lots of campgrounds and other places have donation racks..take one..give one.
Gary Haupt
Different people have different priorities. I am not faulting yours since that obviously work for you but what you do will not work for me. I eventually reread my books, often frequently. I do not retain anything well (other than water) so I can reread a book several months later and enjoy it as much, or even more, than I did the first time through. Many of my books are reference material one would not be able to find on the internet (and anything that is on the internet is ephemeral). A large majority of the books I read are series; reading them piecemeal would be more frustrating that I care to deal with. Often, if a book in a series comes out quite some time after the previous one, I will reread the entire series to get back up to spead. I recently did that with Terry Brooks Magic Kingdom series. I tried to read the latest book and kept asking myself, "When did this happen?" "Who is this person?" All in the first chapter. So, I went back and reread the entire series. I enjoyed the last book far much more because of that.
Since I do keep my books (and scanning destroys the book), I do not have any trading stock so book exchanges do not work well for me. Occasionally, I get duplicate books or books I'll never read or read again. I also occasionally score books at yard sales cheap enough to use for trading stock at book exchanges or used book stores.
Dutch_12078 wrote: Even Amazon.com usually has a couple hundred of them available at any given time.
A couple hundred?!?
Try 50,549 (as of a few seconds ago). Plus another 20,244 public domain books.
By the time I weed out the foreign language and free for Prime members only books, I didn't think the free books numbers went quite that high, but that's even better.
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