(no subject)
Feb. 2nd, 2010 07:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienI bought a bunch of Tor books today and yesterday. On barnesandnoble.com.
Some of them were books I would have bought in a few weeks anyway, from that Other Retailer. Some of them were hardcovers for which I would have rather waited for the MMPB, but there doesn't appear to be one in sight. That feels a bit like rewarding Macmillan for what from my point of view as a reader is undesirable behavior -- delaying the paperback past the year or so that I've come to expect over the last couple of decades -- but it isn't the authors' fault. And a couple of them were just because.
(EDIT: I know I'm very fortunate to be in a position to do this sort of thing now and again. For quite a while now, the main constraint on my book buying has been reading time, followed by storage space. That's not so for everybody, and it may not be so for me next year, but for now I'm making the most of it.)
The site worked pretty well, and looks clean; it hung once on my outdated Linux Firefox, but that didn't cause any real problems. Their free shipping doesn't come with a capriciously-enforced arbitrary delay; on the other hand they do charge (or at least "put a hold") up front for pre-orders. And I kind of want a Nook, now, but that doesn't make sense at this juncture.
I have no idea what the answer is to the larger questions raised by the whole ebook mess. As a reader, what I'd like is reasonably-priced, properly-produced files, ideally without DRM and readable on any device of my choice. Currently, my choice is my Palm TX; it's trivially portable, multi-functional, doesn't tie me to a content or bandwidth provider, and reads several different formats. It isn't elegant, and it doesn't look like a book, but once I got used to the interface I found I could lose myself in the story quite happily. I don't want a smartphone -- I barely use my dumbphone enough to make it worthwhile feeding it the $20 a quarter to keep it alive -- or a dedicated reader that costs nearly as much as the Palm, weighs more, and only does one thing; reading on my laptop or desktop is not particularly appealing either.
Recently, some of my favorite authors have been selling e-books directly, and I find I'm quite happy to pay $5-10 for those, knowing all the money is going direct to the author. That only works, though, because the authors in question have been writing for most of my adult life, and I trust them to produce something I'll enjoy; to some extent, the e-book sideline is leveraging what their publishers have done for them in the past. I can't see that model working for an unknown, but it does seem that the old paradigms are breaking down, and I have no idea what the market will look like in five years' time.
Some of them were books I would have bought in a few weeks anyway, from that Other Retailer. Some of them were hardcovers for which I would have rather waited for the MMPB, but there doesn't appear to be one in sight. That feels a bit like rewarding Macmillan for what from my point of view as a reader is undesirable behavior -- delaying the paperback past the year or so that I've come to expect over the last couple of decades -- but it isn't the authors' fault. And a couple of them were just because.
(EDIT: I know I'm very fortunate to be in a position to do this sort of thing now and again. For quite a while now, the main constraint on my book buying has been reading time, followed by storage space. That's not so for everybody, and it may not be so for me next year, but for now I'm making the most of it.)
The site worked pretty well, and looks clean; it hung once on my outdated Linux Firefox, but that didn't cause any real problems. Their free shipping doesn't come with a capriciously-enforced arbitrary delay; on the other hand they do charge (or at least "put a hold") up front for pre-orders. And I kind of want a Nook, now, but that doesn't make sense at this juncture.
I have no idea what the answer is to the larger questions raised by the whole ebook mess. As a reader, what I'd like is reasonably-priced, properly-produced files, ideally without DRM and readable on any device of my choice. Currently, my choice is my Palm TX; it's trivially portable, multi-functional, doesn't tie me to a content or bandwidth provider, and reads several different formats. It isn't elegant, and it doesn't look like a book, but once I got used to the interface I found I could lose myself in the story quite happily. I don't want a smartphone -- I barely use my dumbphone enough to make it worthwhile feeding it the $20 a quarter to keep it alive -- or a dedicated reader that costs nearly as much as the Palm, weighs more, and only does one thing; reading on my laptop or desktop is not particularly appealing either.
Recently, some of my favorite authors have been selling e-books directly, and I find I'm quite happy to pay $5-10 for those, knowing all the money is going direct to the author. That only works, though, because the authors in question have been writing for most of my adult life, and I trust them to produce something I'll enjoy; to some extent, the e-book sideline is leveraging what their publishers have done for them in the past. I can't see that model working for an unknown, but it does seem that the old paradigms are breaking down, and I have no idea what the market will look like in five years' time.