News - Amazon Kindle Matchbook offers to bundle print and eBooks

[HEXUS]

Also a new improved Kindle Paperwhite device is announced.

Read more.

[Myss_tree]

You can run up a far old bit of expenditure if you start adding all the accessories as well.
No card slot of any description? Not everyone is sold on the cloud.

[crossy]

You can run up a far old bit of expenditure if you start adding all the accessories as well.

Don't buy the official accessories then - 3rd party ones are invariably cheaper or more full featured. Plus, apart from a light and a case, what other accessories are needed?

No card slot of any description? Not everyone is sold on the cloud.

Card slot would be a useful idea IF you're one of those folks who buys hundreds of thousands of books. The original sales point of the Kindle was that you could store "thousands" of books on it. Now I just checked my one and I figure that my 139 books take up around 100MB of space, so just under 1M/book (very rough and ready figure). In which case I should be able to stick just over 1350 novels of the current size on my old gen 4 model. And even at Amazon's discount pricing that's a very sizeable chunk of money!

Also, the majority of the books on my Kindle were never anywhere near Amazons Kindle cloud. Baen and other eBook shops sell titles - many of them DRM-free - at reasonable rates. Buy one of those and in some cases it's even in Kindle file format, if not then Calibre (free!) will happily convert them for you - assuming that your ebookshop won't let you have it in some Kindle-friendly format like .mobi. Once you've got your files, it's a matter of seconds to hook the Kindle up to a PC (Windows or Linux) and upload/download as desired.

In which case, unless you're talking either about the "Fire" model Kindles, or the older ones that could play MP3's, I fail to see the utility of a card slot. Adding one just makes the device more expensive and the majority of folks won't use it anyway.

[Saracen]

Well, interesting. When (and if) it launches in the UK, I'll take a hard look at this. It just might convince me to start buying my books from Amazon. Maybe.

But only if, first, the range of books is good enough, AND free. I am not, on principle, paying to buy a book and then paying for a Kindle version of it. Paying for a DRM-locked Kindle-only version? So if I switch from Kindle to, well whatever, I can't use it? Nuts to that.

I buy a lot of books. My "library" currently consists of several thousand titles, and I've added two hardbacks and five paperbacks in the last week or ten days. But so far, none of my books have been bought from Amazon, and neither of my Kindles have Amazon licenced (and locked) content on them. I like the Kindle a lot, but if it was a choice between paying for ther locked content or giving up the Kindle, it's bye-bye Kindle. Fortunately, it isn't.

[kalniel]

I've been waiting for this since e-books were announced from Amazon, and have not considered an e-book reader until this was the case.

[Saracen]

You can run up a far old bit of expenditure if you start adding all the accessories as well.
No card slot of any description? Not everyone is sold on the cloud.

As crossy said, what accessories?

I added a case for each of mine, at about £8 each. I don't need a light, but I gusss that could add a couple of quid .... like the one the wife bought me.

As for expansion cards, I have a vast amount of material on mine, including some very large PDF's, and am nowhere near capacity. I'm not even near half of it. Each Kindle takes about 4000 books (in my versions). And I have NOTHING stored on any could service, Amazon or otherwise, and no plans to change that. Never needed expansion cards, either. For a tablet, yes. Kindle, no.

[Myss_tree]

As crossy said, what accessories?

...


As for expansion cards,...

According to the accessories list you would spend an extra £106.95 if you bought the five items. Yes you can get all the accessories as non branded cheaper alternatives and there is no need for the warranty but there are a lot of folk who will see them all and buy.
There appears to be a trend now away from supplying external ports on mobile devices with i think the intention of eventually charging folk for cloud storage. That may be a few years away but it will happen.

[Tpyo]

I take it they mean only if you buy the book *new* from amazon (so second hand or new from Amazon marketplace would not count?)

[Saracen]

According to the accessories list you would spend an extra £106.95 if you bought the five items. Yes you can get all the accessories as non branded cheaper alternatives and there is no need for the warranty but there are a lot of folk who will see them all and buy.
There appears to be a trend now away from supplying external ports on mobile devices with i think the intention of eventually charging folk for cloud storage. That may be a few years away but it will happen.

You could be right about the drive towards cloud.

It wouldn't surprise me. There's a general trend emerging towards getting us all to stump up subscription fees, be it Office 365, Adobe Cloud or getting us onto 'free" cloud services, so as to get us onto paid premium versions.

Which is why, for a tablet, I bought a Samsung and immediately stuck a 32GB card in it.

But personally, I have zero intention of putting anything in the cloud, now or ever, free or not. If I can't do it locally, and control it myself, I won't do it.

But, for Kindle, and especially for those with larger (4GB) storage, I can't see me ever needing more than that. After all, e-book files are typically very small, and a Kindle is a quite tightly focussed device, unlike tablets, smart-phones, etc.

[g8ina]

I found that if I stacked my original Kindle with near limit of books, then page turning became painfully slow, so now I just have the set Im reading. Usually no more than 25 books at a time. Speed readers will appreciate what I mean about page speed

[Saracen]

I found that if I stacked my original Kindle with near limit of books, then page turning became painfully slow, so now I just have the set Im reading. Usually no more than 25 books at a time. Speed readers will appreciate what I mean about page speed

Was that one of the smaller or larger memory versions, and an earlier or later model?

I've got one of the last keyboard ones (4GB and, IIRC, Kindle 3) and a Kindle Touch (4GB again) and I've not noticed any slowdown. Then again, I've not got antwhere near the claimed 4000-4500 book limit. Or rather, not loaded on it at any one time.

I do like to keep a broad spread of choice on it, so there will be everything from current releases to free classics, and a variety of genres and authors, so when I'm away, I can pick according to my mood and inclination. It might be Dickens or Terry Pratchet, and it might be scifi/fantasy or Virgil or James Joyce. Or whatever.

But I've always found even a couple of hundred books is plenty, and Calibre lets me load and unload very easily.

[Funkstar]

You can run up a far old bit of expenditure if you start adding all the accessories as well.
No card slot of any description? Not everyone is sold on the cloud.

The kindle isn't a tablet, you don't need a lot of storage. Any any mension of "cloud" storage is simple marketing. You can remove books from your device and then add them later from the ones you have previously bought that are still in your account online. It isn't seamless cloud storage, it's just a record of your purchases that you can re-send to your device when you want them.

[Funkstar]

As for Matchbook, I really hope it comes to the UK (I think it should, the CD/MP3 version of this did), it's something I've thought should be possible from the start of ebooks.

I can see me using this service a lot if it in launched here. I still buy the paperbacks of the books I read on my kindle, because I like to have them on shelves in my living room.

[hatsumi]

I really hope this comes off. I've hundreds of books bought from amazon! would be nice to get a cheaper kindle digitalcopy along with the hardcopy book. I've had to limit the hard copy books lately to a few authors due to lack of space.