Month: February 2008

I’ve been thinking about the Kindle again. I still haven’t quite decided to buy one, but I’m getting closer.

Here’s a scenario that’s got me thinking:
(It’s kind of a long story, so bear with me.)
I bought the audiobook version of Brad Meltzer’s “Zero Game” from iTunes awhile ago. I’ve been listening to it in the car, and enjoying it quite a bit. I hit a point, though, where the audio just cut out and skipped ahead about five chapters. I went back and forth with Apple about it, and eventually got a refund. (They tell me that they’ve now posted a corrected version, so if you’re interested in the book, don’t let this glitch stop you from buying it!)

While I was going back and forth with support, though, I really wanted to just continue reading the book. If I’d had a Kindle, I could have just bought it from Amazon, and picked up reading the missing parts the same day I hit the glitch.

I did wind up buying a used hardcover copy of the book from Amazon so I could read the missing part. Now, while that obviously took longer to get to me than the Kindle version would have, it was a bit cheaper, and I can (theoretically) resell it, or just give it away, when I’m done reading it.

However, I’m sitting here right now looking at the book, and thinking that I’m probably going to just toss it on the floor in a pile of other old books when I’m done with it. The used book system on Amazon is great for buyers, but they’ve driven down prices on used books so much that there’s not much point trying to sell it after I’m done with it. And I don’t know anybody who’d really be interested in reading it who I could hand it off to. And I know I’ll never talk myself into just throwing it out.

I’ve got a whole bunch of books that fall into this category. Basically, books that I’m probably never going to want to re-read, and have almost no resale value, but I can’t bring myself to throw them out.

In some ways, the economics of this seem almost perverse, but I think I might be willing to pay a little extra to buy a book that doesn’t leave any physical footprint in my tiny little apartment. Something I can keep on a device, or my computer’s hard drive, or wherever, for however long I want. It’s annoying that the DRM scheme on any e-book reader (Sony or Amazon) will prevent me from loaning or giving away my old “books.” And it’s a little galling that the e-books generally cost more than a used copy in hardcover or paperback. But I’m looking at this apartment full of old books, and thinking that I could really reclaim a lot of space if I could just get rid of some of them!

Having said that, though, there are certainly still a lot of books I’d like to keep in hard copy form. Jasper Fforde’s books, for instance, wouldn’t work well on a Kindle, since he plays with fonts, footnotes, and other odd stuff that wouldn’t translate well into the single-typeface Kindle. In fact, Fforde’s concept of the “UltraWord” system, introduced in “Well of Lost Plots”, is, in some ways, a parody of DRM’d e-book systems. One of the characteristics of UltraWord was that you could only read any given book three times, then it would just refuse to open.

I’m aware that buying DRM’d e-books right now, for any platform, will probably leave me with books that I won’t be able to read again past, say, five or ten years, since whatever platform I buy now will probably be gone by then. I bought Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy in Microsoft Reader format several years back, and read them on my old Toshiba Pocket PC. While I still have those files around somewhere, I don’t have the Pocket PC anymore. If I want to read those books again on the Kindle, I’d have to repurchase them. (And, hey, I see that I can get them for the Kindle, for $3.19 each. That’s actually not a bad price. Cheaper than the average used copy, even.)