happy new year!
i celebrated new year’s eve by being asleep by 10 pm. it was awesome. though i was up briefly at 11:15 with the baby.
the dog celebrated by getting me up at 3 am with diarrhea. it was awesome. NOT.
so i’m reading a book of short stories – Too much happiness by alice munro. it is good, but i have run into a problem i also experienced with david’s sarais’s new books a year ago - that i have already read a few stories in the new yorker. (more then a few in sarais’s book). i’ve now read 5 stories in munro’s book and had already read 2 of them. so. i double paid. soooooo annoying. why are things double published? well, i guess i understand, but there should be some warning. or something.
on the subject of the kindle. i do NOT understand how the pricing of kindle books work. i bought The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society a week or so ago for $7.46. I looked a couple of days later and it was $7. New releases are $10. A lot of old books are $10, but some are $5 (like twilight book 1). i do not understand. and it is just something else to be neurotic about. Oh. and i just reminded that I had not posted my initial thoughts on my kindle at are summed up by this email i wrote carter:
so yes, i have a kindle
i adore my kindle.
i do not adore the fact that amazon has a lock on the technology of the kindle.
my library has ebooks of the adobe ebook format available for “check out”.
on first internet glance, it seemed that i could convert these ebook to pdf and get them on the kindle that way.
turns out that that doesn’t really work anymore (judging by date stamps, it worked last year)
it has been hard for me to accept that i have to buy the books from amazon as i have been using my library/half.com for book for years.
i dug around and found
(1) most “classics” are free or $1 in the kindle store
(2) a lot of out of copyright books can be found as pdfs and then can be transferred to your kindle
(3) some older books are <$10. i have found no ryhme or reason to amazon’s pricing scheme for non-new releases. i got the first twilight book for $4.25. atwood’s the handmaid’s tale is $3.75. but some old chick lit books are $10. i just got the potato peel book for $8.
in the end, i’ve just come to terms with the fact that, like music, i should be willing to pay for books. $10 is a good deal on new releases. and i just think of it as supporting writers.
Pages:
It would be interesting to know how much of the $10 the writer receives – $1, $0.1, 0.01? Also, it would be interesting to know how the amount they receive compares for a digital versus printed book.