I do, but not directly from their websites because those copies are not lendable. Kindle versions are, at least from most of the publishers in the genres I read. If a publisher doesn’t allow their books to be loaned on Kindle I don’t buy it from them anywhere (I’m looking at you, Carina Press). Being able to share a favorite book is one of my great joys in reading, and ebooks should be no different. I have gotten my best friend to stop pirating by loaning her ebooks, and now she BUYS a ton because she still gets the fun of sharing, in a legal way.

If indie publishers could figure out some kind of DRM that let their website-sold versions be shared, even if only one time, I’d happily purchase directly from them.

I love my NOOK, but it is not international. It’s an American gizmo for people living in the US, and I don’t expect that to change anytime soon.

Remember, your Kindle will handle several formats. You don’t have to do all your shopping at Amazon.

You can download compatible formats to your computer and then upload them to the Kindle via the USB interface. However, pay attention to DRM requirements that the Kindle might have problems with. For instance, Mobi formatted stuff will read just fine on the Kindle (Amazon owns MobiPocket), but not if it has DRM (Digital Rights Management) in place.

personally, I was thinking about getting the nook, but after reading more about the cost, I am going to switch to the KindleII. I will have to download about 50-100 books in 3 weeks or so. Since I am an expat, that lives in Africa. baggage weight its import to me. its easier to transpot a Kindle, rather than 50-100 books.

p.s. sorry for misspellings, I am a lousy typist.

But people are not the automatons that behavioral psychologists think they are. It just doesn’t work out that way in real life.

Example, in “The Fighter Queen” eBook series by John Bowers (THE NUMBERS ARE FAKE, but the ratio is correct):

A Vow to Sophia 511 pages (equivalent to a mass market paperback book) eBook price $8. Total sales “400″.

Star Marine 853 pages “super special promotion” $2.12. Total sales 0 (zero, zip, nadda). We raised the price to $9.50 and it’s sold “100″ copies so far.

Add to that the fact that Star Marine was a much better book than “Vow” and should have sold well over the rate of “Vow” when it was on sale — if your argument were correct. And yes, we left it at that price for quite a while and advertised it even more heavily that we had “Vow” just to see if we could start a new trend towards less expensive books (the idea being to sell so many more copies at the lower price that total income would be higher — everybody wins).

People aren’t always logical. If we were, we’d all vote for the same political candidate (“none of the above”). There’s always that little devil in the back of your head asking “if the book is so great, why do they have to price it so low?” AND WE TOLD THEM WHY!!!!

We’ve bundled all 4 eBooks in the series together for a meager $24 if you want a good deal. That’s a lousy $6/book. I’ll bet it doesn’t sell as well as if we’d priced them at $30 for the set.

We keep trying to get the price down so we can sell thousands instead of hundreds, but we have to face the reality of human nature. In spite of everything, we’re still lower on average than the prices on Amazon for their Kindle line of eBooks. I’d hate to think we have to raise our prices to that level just for the books to be taken seriously.

If you want cheap books, go to Project Gutenberg for free classics and Scribd for self-published freebees. That’s about as cheap as you can get; and the old classics feature some really great names and stories everyone who wants to compete on Jeopardy should know.

“Under the most careful conditions of temperature, pressure, and humidity, the organism will do as it damned well pleases.” -Robert Heinlein

Look now, if we could sell 3 times as many copies of a book at $2 than we do at $4.95, we’d be fools not to lower the price. But it just doesn’t work out that way. We actually sell fewer!

Same author, same series.

A fairly popular and prolific mid-list mystery author conducted his own experiment. Now, he has a very good established following in paper and digital formats and he managed to hang onto his digital rights. He tried prices from $2 to $7 for comparable books and made significantly more money from the higher-priced books.

Ficbot, we WANT to sell books at a lower price. We want more readers and we certainly want to make more money. But so far, it’s been a losing proposition rather than the winner it SHOULD BE.

Now, who/what would YOU blame for this?

The more I look into the ebook pricing thing, the more I’m convinced that Jeff Bezos got it right.

You and I can bitch all we want about what “should be”, but good ol’ human nature will kill you every time. It’s kinda like the law of gravity. You can fight against it, but you ain’t gonna win. You either live with it or die while trying to fly after you’ve launched yourself off the skyscraper.

eBooks still have costs in them. The author generally spent upwards of a year writing the book (no matter what the format) and wants to be paid for his time, effort, and risk. The publisher still has to edit the manuscript (labor intensive) and do all the other things necessary to create a paper book EXCEPT the actual printing and physical distribution. And the people who do this work want to be paid for their time for some strange reason. None of these people are in the business for charity’s sake. Like you, they have to put Rice Krispies on the table and pay the rent.

Amazon has artificially capped prices at $9.99 by taking a larger percentage of the sales price of those that sell over that price. Some publishers are going along with it, some aren’t. I’ve actually seen some Kindle books priced higher than the mass market paperback versions (new).

At AKW books, our prices are generally below Amazon’s normal range, but probably higher than many people would like to see because of that human “cussedness” problem. Still a good deal, especially if you are a Book Club member (no strings, no charge, just discounts and a monthly e-mail newsletter).

Now, if you can figure out how to re-educate the buying public, maybe prices CAN come down from publishers who would really like to sell more at a lower price. This would put a lot of pressure on the rest to do likewise if their sales slip while the lower priced books are “raking it in”.

The $2 book actually sold FEWER copies than other, smaller, higher priced books in the series. It is the best book in the series and the largest in shear word count, but people snubbed it.

Too cheap? “People only value what they have to pay for” is an old mantra. Perhaps that’s true.

I hear a lot of bitching and moaning about the price of eBooks, but when someone does something about it, most people are afraid that it’s a scam. So, as much as we at AKW Books would like to help cure the problem, human nature and economics won’t allow it.

Anyway, tomorrow (Thursday) the book will be going up in price to where it SHOULD have been priced, $6.95. Maybe people will value it more.