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The price of kindle books is a bit steep......

My wife bought me (and her parents) a Kindle. I love mine and have bought and read a number of books in it. It's a great little gadget which I really enjoy and aside a few gripes about its function, I think it's very nice.

However, the biggest gripe I have is that the kindle can become a very expensive little habit if one reads a lot of books purchased from Amazon. Really, at $9+ per pop, it can get pretty expensive in a short while. Given that the publishing, warehousing, storage, etc. of these books must be many times less expensive than hardback or paperback editions, it seems that the books should cost a fraction of the current retail prices...

Like I said, I love my kindle and all, but the other day I found myself looking around for yard or garage sales to look for used paperbacks... Typically, the cost of one of those is anywhere from $.10 to maybe $1.00 !! I don't expect Amazon to sell books that cheaply, but 50 to 100 times more?

I they want the Kindle to really take off, they have to make more books available at more reasonable prices. Specially considering that the purchaser cannot resell, lend or even give away the book after he or she is done with it...

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Permalink Reply by John Van Roekel on December 31, 2008 at 11:03am: You might take a look at Braver Deeds, a historical novel by me (John Van Roekel), available on Amazon for $1.49 (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00104JF7O). More information, including the first chapter for free, at http://braverdeeds.com/.

John; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Andrys on January 8, 2009 at 7:07am: Here's a shortcut link direct to the 'million free books' topic on the Amazon forums.

http://www.tinyurl.com/freebooksites

There are currently 759 posts in that topic...; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Manuel on January 8, 2009 at 9:00am: Thanks to everybody for the input and advise. I have found that Amazon does offer some bargains and that there are other sources for books, albeit not seamless to use with the Kindle. I've been using my Kindle a good bit lately. I have not figured out a quick way to go back and forth in a book. When I read I often find myself re-reading or going back to read a few paragraphs or pages back. Especially when a novel or short story has a lot of characters. Is there some technique or trick to make this easier?
Also, can my Kindle display PDF documents?

Thanks

Manuel; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Mary on January 8, 2009 at 9:22pm: Manuel,
I have learned that if you hold the alt key when you press page forward or page back, you will jump about 10 pages in that direction. Not as precise as picking a page number, but effective!

Mobi pocket creator will convert a pdf to a format the Kindle will read. I haven't tried it yet, but will soon, as I have found a book in PDF format I'd like to put on my Kindle. (Mobi creator is free, by the way!)

Mary; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Andrys on January 8, 2009 at 11:54pm: Manuel, if I want to go back to re-read, I bookmark the current page I'm on, to be sure I can get back there when I want. When I've re-read what I want and am back to the page I paused at, I then delete that bookmark. (That can be done with pressing Alt-b when on the page -- or going up to the top and pressing the scroll-wheel -- or doing a Menu/Add Bookmark.)

I think that alt-key previous/next feature is something like 5% of the book. But I do use that to skip ahead.

With PDFs, if they are mainly text, just emailing the text to your Kindle address will make a decent conversion. I have MobiPocket Creator but so far has just sent them to my [user]@kindle.com address.

Now, if a PDF is almost all large images or the text itself is image based (as Amazon-previews and google books are), forget it. The Kindle won't be converting graphics to text characters, nor will MobiPocket (though the latter might be able to reduce the image sizes but then they won't likely be very readable on the Kindle).

I download a lot of pdf manuals and send them to my Kindle. They are great to have in one place (normally I look all over for them otherwise, if I can find them at all).

However, to send stuff to your Kindle address for conversion, you need to approve the sending-to-Kindle e-mail address (normally our main email addresses).

For those who don't know -- check your amazon Kindle account at http://www.amazon.com/manageyourkindle
and look at the "Your Kindle approved e-mail list" box to see if you approved the email address you'd use for sending to your Kindle. If you didn't have to approve one, you could get all kinds of spam on your Kindle, not to mention books you don't want, sent by anyone.

PDFS that are solely or mainly image-based rather than text based will have to be reduced to barely readable sizes for current e-readers. So, don't bother trying to convert image-only PDFs. The text renditions in those can be hideous (it can be hideous on computers too but at least readable on larger screens -- examples, the book previews on Amazon).; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Phil on January 9, 2009 at 5:44am: If you are converting PDF's and the text within it is selectable, I copy the text to a Word document and then save that as type "Web Page, filtered". This creates the file with a final extension of HTML and strips out many of the extra commands. It also allows you to edit the thing and remove all the line feeds - this is what makes a smooth transition to Kindle format and retains the flow when font-size is changed. I usually pick full-justification so the text lines up on both left and right. Then send the html file to [user]@kindle.com address or [user]@free.kindle.com address (the latter to avoid the charge, but it goes to your computer instead of directly to the Kindle).; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Andrys on January 9, 2009 at 7:03am: Hi, Phil
Yes it's usually text-based (instead of each page being a graphic image as Google does it) if you can select the text.

If we can, then just sending it to [user]@kindle.com gets the job done. I worry about moving text to Word and then save-converting it to Word's html, which is tremendously bloated code and means a much slower loading file. I just did one for a website, which was 300k in Word, 600k in Word-to-html and I took a Word/Html cleaner utility and converted that last one to pure non-Word html and got it down to about 70k that way -- and the loading time can be important.

However, if you really want something within it formatted just so, I think mobipocket creator seems to do that very cleanly direct to a .prc file which is then just movable to the Kindle 'Documents' folder.

But I've had great luck with just sending text-based pdfs to my Kindle address. Word is they've been working on making the auto-conversions better.

Ooh, re your note about line-justifications, I'm one who chooses to left-justify so I don't have to see the toothy gaps that come from full justification :-)

I'll remember what you prefer to do and give that a go sometime except I know I'd have to strip the word-html as it is humongous...

What I like about your process is that we can easily strip out in a program we know, portions of text we don't need etc.

A regular Kindle blogger wrote that an Amazon rep told him they decided not to charge for the [user]@kindle.com conversions.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Manuel on January 9, 2009 at 7:08am: Thanks, that's a lot of useful information. I need to dig around the Kindle guide and practice emailing docs or books to my Kindle. I too want to download and store manuals in my kindle. This is why I was interested in the PDF format. The thing that bothers me a little bit is that manuals usually include a good bit of graphics and photos. I don't know if the kindle can display any of that stuff.
I digress a bit here. My original post was about the high price (perceived) of Kindle books. It does seem that there are lower priced books available from Amazon as well as other sources. I have to admit that I'm a bit lazy and do not delve into the features and inner workings of the Kindle. I'm the type that only uses what's presented in an intuitive manner. I guess if I want to reap benefits, I need to do the work required to obtain them ;)

Manuel; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Andrys on January 9, 2009 at 7:13am: Manuel, a few of my manuals have lots of images but Amazon is doing something that makes them very manageable, handling the size well. If a brochure/manual has 3 illustrations across sometimes you see one illustration and need to nextpage to see the next one, but this means that each one is more viewable, and words within the pic are more readable, so that's worked out pretty well for me. AND, I can search the manuals that way, which is great.

Complex Excel charts or statistical ones won't transfer too well, they say, but I've seen Amazon do better than I expected on some charts lately. Your mileage will vary though.

Hang in there.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Manuel on January 9, 2009 at 7:18am: THanks, I'll try emailing a manual to my Kindle and see what happens.. I have not tried connecting the Kindle to a computer yet. I guess I just have too many gadgets, too many toys and interests and not enough time or concentration to learn some of them very well.....; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Andrys on January 9, 2009 at 7:59am: If people are interested in Suze Orman's book, she's giving a pdf copy of it for free until January 15.

Go to Oprah's site at http://www.oprah.com/article/oprahshow/20081119_tows_bookdownload
to check out what she says about this, re sharing.

The file, direct, is at http://media.oprah.com/sterm/action_plan_english.pdf

It's a little over a meg so a good test for us. People are having good luck doing it via Amazon Kindle email.

Also, NY Times today has a story about how well Amazon seems to be doing with the Kindle.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/business/09views.html; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Nicolette on January 10, 2009 at 9:31pm: Hello Manuel,

I don't think that popular mainstream writers are going to switch over to writing for FREE.

So the bigger this thing gets, the more expensive the books are going to become. Count on it.

The KINDLE books are still a lot cheaper than the Hardcover or Paperbacks.

About 20 years from now, I do believe that the "price model" Amazon is using will be the
national standard. A lot of those "free books" won't be free once this really becomes the
standard way Americans read books.

TO ALL:

My name is Nicolette Larson and I'm new.

Got my Kindle as a gift 6 months ago.

I just did my first blog and would love your responses.

Link: http://www.booksummit.com/profiles/blogs/switching-overto-the-kindle; ▶ Reply to This