Comments | phanatic: (без темы)

phanatic

(Untitled)

Aug 21, 2010 18:20

It's nice to see that some book publishers have their heads just as firmly up their asses as many of morons in the RIAA.

I have a trip to England coming up (probably), so I figured I might grab some stuff for the Kindle. Looked for David Kahn's The Codebreakers over at Amazon ( Read more... )

Comments 6

smjayman August 22 2010, 00:08:05 UTC

Yeah, the e-book world pisses me off more and more every time I look for something. Either it isn't available or it is WAY fucking overpriced.

evilegg August 22 2010, 01:57:20 UTC

I'm gonna write my own goddamn books.

dantheserene August 22 2010, 02:08:15 UTC

This is why people like me haven't embraced e-books. I love books and gadgets and I absolutely should be the target audience, but I'm not confident in the system yet.

fishsupreme August 22 2010, 19:19:32 UTC

Yeah, the publishing industry as a whole is pretty much insane. They're so desperate to fight piracy with their crazy DRM, but every time something like this happens people like me say, "Hmm, looks like it's not really available from Amazon, I'll just go torrent it instead."

Publishers complain that you can't compete with free. But this is absurd, companies successfully compete with free all the time. Somehow Microsoft sells Windows and Office even though Ubuntu and OpenOffice are free. But to compete with a free alternative you need your product to be either better or more convenient than the free alternative.

Instead they give us products that are substantially worse (e.g. by encumbering them with DRM or putting about 47 irritating unskippable tracks at the beginning of every DVD) or make acquiring legitimate media more cumbersome and difficult than acquiring pirated media. Or they do stupid shit like making an ebook cost 63% more than a physical one ( ... )

Publishers set the price, not retailer pasquin August 22 2010, 20:48:03 UTC

Actually, Amazon was forced into an 'agency model' of ebook pricing by five of the major publishing conglomerates. Agency is a euphemism for 'cartel tells you the fucking price and you have to like it'.

Amazon frequently priced ebooks at a loss just to remain competitive. And does so when allowed.

kdot August 24 2010, 16:31:39 UTC

One reason I bought the Sony Reader was that I'm able to use it to read library books and out-of-copyright books I can get for free. Nothing I've read on it is brand spanking new, but I haven't paid a dime for any of it, and it's nice to be reading books instead of crappy free newspapers on my commute these days.