Kindle Garten

Funny you should have just posted this. I have just borrowed from my work the sony ereader & the kindle.

They are really underwhelming. If you are a book lover, I think that one of the key things to notice is that they are ugly. The typography is all wrong. They use minute & second marks instead of quotation marks. The text is justified, but they don't seem to use any hyphenation algorithm, so there are big rivers. I don't see how they got this so wrong. Reading text is the primary thing that people are supposed to do on these things. How can you make the text ugly by default?

These devices include music players, but they couldn't spend the money to get the typography close to correct?

Further, there seems to be very little the designers can do to change the typography of the book. So none of the books seem to have any personality; they all have the same font, same layout, etc.

Ugly, expensive, and the books I see for sale on Amazon are not less than half the price of the real thing. Unless you really hate books on your shelf, I can't imagine why you would buy a kindle edition of a book for $15 when you could have the real thing for $18 (see Gourevitch & Morris, Standard Operating Procedure, for this example).

Finally, there is no way I'm going to pay Amazon to allow me to put PDFs, etc. on a device I own. That's crazy.

Try to buy Kindle books from university publishers and you'll find they typically cost twice as much as the Amazon-promised $10. Why university presses are charging more for books that they do not manufacture or ship and thus have no overhead attached is simple: they can. They expect their readership (students assigned textbooks, in the current biz model I've heard from editors at Oxford and Routledge) to pay whatever they charge for the book, and their writers to accept whatever niggling contract terms they offer, without compensatory efforts to "sell" the book online any more than they're doing in brick&mortar stores. Which is nil to begin with.

My thought was that it would make sense for a university to provide all the individual texts and supporting materials for students as part of their tuition package. Texts could be upgraded in the middle of a course if needed. Of course that would benefit the student who is used to being raped by the bookstore every semester which might be too much for the university to give up.