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5 Responses to "Buying a Kindle 2?"

1. | Reply Tim Buchheim
   Posted 05 Mar 2009 at 2:45pm #
   

   The hardware looks pretty nice, but the books are too expensive. I mostly buy mass market paperback. A quick look at the Kindle store shows that I'd be paying about the same price for a DRM-restricted ebook that I would for the real paperback. (Ignoring the fact that I tend to use a ton of 30% off coupons at borders, so I actually get lots of books at a discount.. When I do buy a book at full price, it's usually at my local independent store, Vroman's.)

   When I can buy the books I want for $3.50 intead of $7, I might buy a Kindle. But I see no reason to pay the price of a paperback when I'm only getting a bunch of ones and zeroes, with no printing cost, paper cost, warehousing cost, shipping cost, or anything of the other factors which go into the price of a physical book.

2. | Reply Nate
   Posted 05 Mar 2009 at 2:57pm #
   

   The wife's going to get one for Christmas.

   I don't read enough to justify the purchase for myself. The only appeal it has for me is the "Hitchhiker Guide" appeal and for now my new iPhone will have to do for that. 🙂

3. | Reply Andrew
   Posted 05 Mar 2009 at 3:00pm #
   

   I would like to buy a Kindle, but most of the books on my reading list are not available from Amazon. I'm not sure about the previous post about the books being expensive. I guess it depends on what you read, but they seem to be priced fairly to me.

4. | Reply Kindle 2 On the Way | NSLog();
   Posted 05 Mar 2009 at 3:02pm #
   

   [...] some may have guessed, a Kindle 2 is on its way to [...]

5. | Reply Tim Buchheim
   Posted 05 Mar 2009 at 6:25pm #
   

   I did some more searching in the Kindle store, and it looks like I was a bit unlucky with my initial searches... books by certain authors (such as John C Wright or Ben Bova) are identical to the mass market paperback prices (ignoring amazon's 4-for-3 deal on physical books). a search of some other authors (such as Alastair Reynolds, Terry Pratchett, or Neil Gaiman) reveals books which are a dollar or so less than the mass market price. It probably depends on the publisher. A few authors (such as Gregory Benford) have a few titles which are more reasonably priced, but that seems to be rare among the authors I read.

   But the selection seems excellent.. as far as I can tell, all the authors I read regularly are well represented in the Kindle store. (Aside from a few obvious exceptions, such as J. K. Rowling, but I own all the harry potter books in hardback anyway.)