I've been reading a lot, lately.

I had said that I would wait until the price of Kindle dropped to $89 before I would buy. I got ants in my pants and picked one up when the price dropped to $114. If I'd waited a couple of weeks longer, the price would have dropped even more; I see the price at the left side of this page, is now $99. Oh, well. Not my first mistake.

In the end, it was Blondie's medical care that caused me to jump early. I was spending too much time in waiting rooms with nothing to do, and that time was weighing heavily on my hands.

No Whine Before It's Time

Finally, when she had an appointment that was going to last several hours, I dropped her off and headed for Radio Shack. I had seen a couple of other e-readers at Border's and at Barnes & Noble, and they made a not-altogether-favorable impression. The folks at B&N had two models, and one was considerably better than the other. The poorer one was to be replaced by a new model within a couple of weeks, and that was exciting, but after decades of being a cutting edge user, I wasn't eager to do that again; a better term might be bleeding edge user.

And when I actually got to try out a Kindle, it resolved one issue that really bothered me about the Nook and Kobo. It was not nearly as sluggish. It wasn't easy to actually try a Kindle, though. At Manor shopping center, they didn't have any that weren't sealed in boxes. You couldn't even lay your eyes on one without buying it, much less turn it on and see how fast it turns pages.

It was several days later, at the Shack in the shopping center between Oregon Pike and Lititz Pike at US 30. Look, I said. I want to buy one, but there's no way in hell I'm going to lay out more than a hundred bucks for one if I can't see it in action first. You've got a money back guarantee, right? The clerk nodded. So if I buy it, and I'm dissatisfied, there's a lot of forms to be filled out, right? The clerk nodded. So let me try it first, and there won't be any return. I'll either buy it, or else I'll drive over to Barnes & Noble, and buy an e-reader there.

Well, She Said, There Are Different Models

Well, she said, there are several different models. I said, oh, that. I want to see the $114 one, the one without 3G, but with special offers. She nodded and disappeared into the back. After a couple of minutes of fooling around with it - it needed to be plugged in to work - I said it doesn't seem to be backlit, and it seems to be fairly fragile. I ended up buying a battery-powered book light, and a cover to keep it in, bringing the price up to about $150.

I was tethered to the electric socket because it needed charging, so I had difficulty staying out of the way of people wanting to buy other stuff, but we all tried to make it work, and nobody seemed to be overly annoyed with me. They told me the password to use their WiFi, and I was able to register the Kindle with Amazon and "buy" a couple of public domain books - Tom Sawyer, and the Autobiography of Ben Franklin - for free.

But I hadn't had breakfast, and my blood sugar was low, and I was unsteady on my feet. I decided the Kindle had charged up enough for the time being, and asked where the nearest hotspot was that had seating and food. They thought the coffee shop a couple of stores down fit the bill. It turns out that they don't have WiFi, and there was a long wait for seating, but I managed to make it Giant without collapsing - yeah, I know it sounds like I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. When my blood sugar drops, I get really weak.

The Giant Hotspot

So I bought a bowl of soup and a large Pepsi, and tried to figure out how to connect to the Giant WiFi hotspot. The cold, syrupy pop really was a restorative, and the soup helped a bit, too, but I had trouble connecting to WiFi. I'm not sure if it is inexperience or low blood sugar making me stupid. One needs to connect to the Gtiant website, and agree to Terms of Service, which I eventually figured out. Once I did that, it will be a snap next time. But I haven't used any other hotspots in the month I've had the Kindle.

The soup was too hot, and not quite as tasty as one could hope, but it didn't taste like Campbell's, which was a big plus. I grew up eating a lot of Campbell's Soup, and if that's all you're used to, it ain't bad, but Em, my late first wife, made wonderful homemade soups, and I have a tendency to try soups in restaurants; half of them have really good soup, and the other half have canned condensed soup, which as I said, ain't all that bad, but it is a pretty big disappointment if you were hoping for real soup. And as I said, it was better than Campbell's, but it wasn't going to win the chef any prizes.

All this took longer than I had expected, and I envisioned Blondie waiting impatiently for me on the steps of the office building where she had her appointment, but this time I lucked out. In fact, I had about an hour to wait before Blondie got out, and by that time, I discovered that there's nothing quite so annoying as a Kindle with 2 books on it, neither of which really suit your mood at the moment.

Trying To Fill The Grand Canyon

Since then, I've done my best to fill the solid-state hard drive on the Kindle. I've not been very successful. I have about a hundred fifty books on the Kindle, and I've hardly made a dent in the 4 GB of storage. Books range in size from less than 50K in size to about 500K in size, evem at a half-meg, it'd take 2000 books to use up one gig of memory. I'm not going to run out of memory soon.

And I also realized at that point that I should have bought the 3G model. If you want to get a book with my Kindle, you need to be a WiFi hotspot, or else be able to hook by cable to a computer's USB port. When you're sitting in a waiting room and nothing on your Kindle piques your interest, it'd be nice to shop Amazon for another book. It costs a little extra for the 3G model initially, but with it, you can connect to the AT&T cellphone grid to the internet, and the air time is all on Amazon's dime.

What's more, you can go to Wikipedia, to Google, or whatever other internet site you care to visit. The browser isn't very satisfactory, because your page is so much smaller than what many websites are written for, but if you're in Timbuktu and you want to look up the address of the place you're going to, or the phone number of someone you're going to meet, being able to use that browser for that limited purpose might be worth a lot.

I Recommend The 3G

So I'm recommending to you that you get the 3G version. If you do, and you're unhappy that you did, come see me, and I'll pay you some money to swap Kindles with me. Radio Shack accepts returns within 30 days, but they want all the packaging, which I no longer had when I realized my mistake, and besides, I'd assured the sales clerk that I wanted the cheaper model. Silly me.

When Kindle was new, they offered best-sellers for $9.99, which was quite a savings over the hardcover pricing. Apple came along and decided they wanted to steal the Kindle market with iPad. They signed up the six largest book publishers in an agency model, which is to say that the publisher is the merchant, and the itunes store gets paid a commission. Amazon had to take the agency model as well, with the publishers choosing to up the ante for e-books.

It turns out that those publishing houses are in trouble. Writers have decided that they don't need publishing houses. They can hire copy editors, artists to design a cover, and do their own promotion out of their profits. If a legacy publisher gives the author a 15% royalty on a $12 book, that's $1.80. A self-published author can sell his book for $2.99 and his royalties will be $2.10. Cutting the price turns sales from a thoughtful purchase into a impulse item, and sales skyrocket.

Legacy Publishers Are In Trouble

Undoubtedly, the legacy publishers will either figure out a way to give authors a better deal, or they'll go out of business. Either way, the name authors will soon be much cheaper than they are now. For now, there are a lot of less-well-known authors out there with inexpensive books. The sweet spot for pricing, authors are told, is 99c to $2.99.

In fact, there are a lot of free books out there. All the Gutenberg Project books are free, although enterprising editors have created enhanced versions of many of those books that they sell for 99c or so. By "enhanced", I mean that typos are fixed, the books are laid out more attractively, and they have an attractive cover. However, there's a constant flow of new free books entering the Kindle Store.

Some authors are more interested in fame than fortune. Other authors are trying to change the world, and they want people to read their books so that they eat local foods, worship God the right way, or treat gays with respect, etc. I'm not so sure these books are worth the bother of downloading them. As one Hollywood producer once said, if you want to send a message, put it in a telegram.

Let Free Introduce You

Another reason books are offered for a dollar is as an introductory special. This is especially important for an unknown author. If your book is released for free, you may get a hundred favorable ratings on the five-star basis, and have a dozen or more people posting good reviews of your book on the Amazon site. With that kind of recommendation, potential readers may be willing to buy your book for $2.99 or more.

And it's not just unknown authors that do this. I see Kindle versions of books previously published as hardcover or paperback books being offered for free. I just "bought" a free copy of Cybill Shepherd's biography, Cybill Disobedience, a couple of days ago. I don't know what Harper/Collins's plans are, as far as pricing, but a new copy of the paperback is $24.00....

Amazon is making it easy to publish for the Kindle, and you don't have to sell only at Amazon. You can also sell at Smashwords, or sell the book on your own website. Amazon is trying to steer authors to the 99c to $2.99 sweet spot for pricing by offering higher royalties if retail prices are in that area.

They Gotta Sell The Books, Though

However, they are trying to sell the books. Experts figure that Amazon is losing a little money on every Kindle device sold. Consequently, Kindle won't let you price your book for less than 99c. There's a way around that, though. You simply offer the same book at Smashwords, on your own website, or elsewhere for free, and when your book is released at 99c on Amazon, you click the link that says "Tell us about a lower price elsewhere." Once Amazon sees the lower price elsewhere, they will drop the price to zero to match the price.

If you're doing this as a limited time offer, though, it's not clear how you get Amazon to goose the price back up to 99c or $2.99, or where you think it should be. After you raise the price on the other website, how do you get Amazon to realize that the price has changed?

I love my Kindle, and I'll tell you why - but that will have to wait for another post.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Agency Model - Amazon - Barnes & Noble - Border's - Giant - Kindle - Kobo - Nook - Radio Shack - WiFi