Amazon Kindle

[E.A Rumfield]

Can I get every book on a Kindle that I could get on Amazon or through a bookstore? And what is the average price? I make a habit of buying used books off Amazon or at bargain bookstore and in either case I can get a book for under $5. I'm going to be traveling starting this spring and it makes more sense than carrying a number of books.

[Charles Darnay]

Short answer: no. Not all books available on Amazon are necessarily available on Kindle. But many of the new ones, popular ones, or popular classics will be. The price is generally $15-20 for a newer book, and less for older ones, ranging form $5-10 usually. And of course there is a slew of poorly formatted public domain books.

Unless you are reading a lot of poetry, a Kindle is the way to go for travelling and cost-saving. I wouldn't trust it for poetry: the formatting is just too poor most of the time.

[MorpheusSandman]

No, you can't get every regular book on Kindle. For the ones you can, the Kindles are usually a little cheaper, though some are much cheaper (as with many textbooks) and some are more expensive. Pricing seems to differ publisher to publisher. The impetus for getting a Kindle isn't so much about price as it is about convenience, especially being able to have an entire library on a small, portable device, the ability to highlight, bookmark, and quickly find passages through search, the physical space it saves (not filling up bookshelves, I mean), etc.


I wouldn't trust it for poetry: the formatting is just too poor most of the time.It's getting better. Bad formatting on poetry is is the reason I returned my Kindle about a year ago, but recently I got an iPad and I've been using the Kindle app to read poetry on it frequently as the formatting has gotten a lot better. Publishers like Lexicos and Delphi are quite reliable as far as formatting on poetry goes. Penguin is usually good, too. The public domain stuff is often bad, but the good part is that it's usually free and it often comes with very good critical/academic notes. EG, I downloaded the EH Coleridge editions of Byron and ST Coleridge just to read the excellent footnotes and introductions.

[E.A Rumfield]

Short answer: no. Not all books available on Amazon are necessarily available on Kindle. But many of the new ones, popular ones, or popular classics will be. The price is generally $15-20 for a newer book, and less for older ones, ranging form $5-10 usually. And of course there is a slew of poorly formatted public domain books.

Unless you are reading a lot of poetry, a Kindle is the way to go for travelling and cost-saving. I wouldn't trust it for poetry: the formatting is just too poor most of the time.

Yea that's interesting, I was doing some research and Death On The Installment Plan is not available while Hunger by Knut Hamsun is free or $2.34. I do read a fair amount of poetry but I don't mind bringing some books with me. Jorge Luis Borges isn't really available and the books that are there have been poorly reviewed. Is that something to be expected?

[JBI]

Any book in the public domain, or that you can download (I am in China, downloading is not illegal) is fair game. You can load any book you have a digital copy of onto the drive. Of course, formatting for Chinese is tricky, but I have found away around it (first put it into UTF-8, and then convert it to Mobi, and then upload). Works like a charm. Calibre is an excellent program for putting downloaded books onto the drive.

Though, I still have not found a way to get woodblock-pressed books onto a digital reader. I think the screen is just far too small to make it legible. I need to wait for the 8 1/2 by 11 page-sized Kindle I guess.

[astrum]

Another good thing about Kindles is privacy.

You can read a book in public and not have others know what you're reading.

That's very helpful if you want to read certain political or self-help books in public.

[prendrelemick]

The short answer is no. But I'd still get one if I was traveling. I haven't tried loading up non Amazon stuff but I haven't needed to. You may not save much on the price of current books, and the reading experience is different but you can't beat the convenience.

[MorpheusSandman]

Chicken Run (2000; Peter Lord, Nick Park) - 7/10

The film is worth it for Lord and Park's stunning stop-motion animation, even though the story follows the typical Dreamworks formula of taking archetypal films (this time, prison break films) and using talking animals instead of people. Beyond the references, the film is strangely devoid of real humor. There's also something not quite right about the cast, which feel strangely dislocated from the characters and drama. All that said, it's still perfectly enjoyable and admirable from a technical standpoint.

The Champ (1931; King Vidor) - 8/10

Puccini, eat your heart out! Here's a melodramatic tearjerker for the ages, with Jackie Cooper playing the long-suffering son of a down-and-out alcoholic, gambler, and ex-boxing champion played by Wallace Beery. The film was remade in the 70s, and its closing scene was concluded to be the saddest film ever made in a scientific study of the effects of sad films on audiences. Well, I haven't seen the 70s version, but I can't imagine it being any more devastating than the one here. Like most melodramas, the plot is rather absurd, and the emotions are handled with the subtlety of a jackhammer through brick, but the undeniable on-screen chemistry of Beery and Cooper manages to make it convincing, and emotionally real even when logically false.