5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet

[Andrew Turner]

eBay and Amazon are still good places to list your books: I paid $19 the other day for a HC Larry Niven novel from the 80s.

[Seabyrn]

Readerbreeder wrote:

Seabyrn wrote:

I used to be able to get 10% of retail for fiction, last week it was $1 per book (hardcovers), and some places I know pay less than that, if they'll even take them. It's almost not worth the effort, but I just hate to throw them away.

You could give them to friends, or donate them to Goodwill or the local public library. I hate seeing books without a good home...

Doodlebug Anklebiter wrote:

Yeah, if you can't find a used book store where you can get a decent exchange rate, donating them to a library, church, or Boy Scout troop is a good idea.

Some people may be surprised at me giving props to the churches, but I have ulterior motives. Church books sales (at least here in New England) are a great way to score expensive books for a buck a piece!
When you drop your books off, ask 'em when the next sale is and show up early!

Usually once they make it to my car, if I can't sell them then I'll donate them. In the past I've brought them to Goodwill, and have mailed a couple on to friends/family members. There's also a guy in San Diego that runs a used book charity - he's gotten several boxes from me.

But I did throw away a few paperbacks recently - a few Michael Crichton books and a couple of others that were a bit musty and weren't worth the effort to take anywhere.

As much as I hated to throw them away, I'm caring less and less recently. I'm buying fewer books than I used to (but still maybe too many!), and have probably passed along some 25-30 boxes (small u-haul boxes) or so of books. I'm sure I've got that many left though, and would rather focus on a good home for the books I love than having not enough space for books I am ambivalent about.

[Seabyrn]

Andrew Turner wrote:

eBay and Amazon are still good places to list your books: I paid $19 the other day for a HC Larry Niven novel from the 80s.

I've tried ebay in the past, and had very little luck. Even starting books for a dollar with free shipping, people weren't bidding. I think it depends on what you're selling - some books do hold value, but most don't.

[Andrew Turner]

Well, here's a new and distressing development.

So, now $9 seems a good and discounted price for an ebook version, since the paperback runs almost twice as much retail. But what can I expect when the HC is $35?--a $15 Word document auto-formatted into ePub...

I'm just b$@**in'...

Also, it's irritating that the 4-book physical copy boxed set is $20, but the 4-book ebook set is $35.

[Nobody Important]

I love "thumbing-through" D&D books in hard cover...something that just wouldn't feel satisfying with ebooks.

[Andrew Turner]

Here's another ebook gouge for you: John Connolly's Halloween novel, The Gates, retails in paperback for $6.99. In the UK it's roughly the same, at £4.99. The UK ebook runs 50p cheaper than the physical book, but the US ebook is nearly twice as much at $11.99...

WTF.

It's one thing to pay the same for a digital version as a physical one, but more? In 2011?

[Xabulba]

An explanation why some eBooks cost more than print.

[Banjax]

Much like so many other people ebook pricing has been the bugbear that has stopped me buying a reader, possibly its just me being stingy but if I have the opportunity and all things being equal im going to buy the lower priced version of the book, so when Amazon sells many of its paperbacks for less than their ebook equivalents why should I pay extra?

But my main gripe is the problem of what to do with the books I've already got?

There are several series' that I'm reading that are still being published and I don't really (or perhaps really don't) like the idea of having half of a series on the Kindle and the other half sitting on my shelves but ebook pricing makes it untenable to just rebuy them all in e-format.

It's all very well saying an entire library in one place but that just doesn't hold true if i want to read a series that is split across physical and electronic media and wont until there either becomes a market for 2nd hand e-books (which would mean submitting yourself to some pretty draconian DRM) or the price of older books depreciate in the same way all other media does meaning that people can buy an entire back catalogue of books without breaking the bank.

If there was a viable way of 'backing up' my current library to ebook format (without rebuying each book at 70% or more of what I originally paid for it) I'd have converted long ago