Anyone know a cheaper place to get ebooks than amazon? They all seem to be more expensive the paperback or even the hardcover.

Preferably a monthly service like netflicks that just lets you read as many as you wish.

Do you know http://www.baenebooks.com/? They have a good selection of scifi and fantasy, DRM-free, fair prices, and a pretty extensive free library. You can even get some sort of subscription, but I haven't looked into that.

You can also get books via itunes, the ibooks app in particular. Many are very affordable, and I find their DRM much more palatable than amazon's.

I haven't used http://www.drivethrufiction.com/ much, but they do have some interesting offers from time to time.

I assume you're familiar with http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/, which doesn't come with a flat rate, but is rather completely free.

Yes, baen I know and love. I own like 50-100 of their ebooks.

Itunes- all my stuff is android.

drivethrufiction - I tried looking up a few authors and no results. Is this more of a self publishing site? I'm looking for basically fantasy and scifi best sellers.

gutenberg is for expired copyright stuff. Not what I'm looking for either sadly.

drivethru is when you're looking for Battletech novels, ime. There's self-published weird tidbits, and stuff put out by gaming companies.

As I said, though, I don't use the site that frequently.

Have you tryed smashwords?

If you like sci fi try

Spinward Fringe series
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_ ... ard+fringe
Battle for the solar system (honour of the knights/the third way)

Giving Jackie a Kobo Touch for her birthday, with Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide.... Can you guess how old she is?

The Auld Grump

Anyone else been following ?

Apple involved with price fixing, along with major publishers - with Jobs himself describing the tactic as 'an Aikido move'. (never mind the fact that it is also an illegal move....)

Oh. The shock. ***WARNING! WARNING! SARCASM LEVELS CRITICAL! WARNING! WARNING! ***

So many people seem to view Apple as the 'good guys'.... I remember when the Mac was supposed to be a $500 computer. When plugging in the printer yourself voided the warranty. When Jobs and Gates together raided ideas from PARC. How Jobs pushed Wozniak out of Apple, and then had the gall to be upset when the same thing was done to him years later....

No, Jobs was not one of the 'good guys'.

Left out of the suit is Amazon - which has been telling publishers that it was against the law all along. (Those prices being complained about above? Set by the publishers, not Amazon.)

Also left out was Baen - and for good reason!

The Auld Grump

Yeah saw a story about that today. The talking head thought it would mean falling ebook prices at least for a time. I hope that comes true. I've been converted to the ebook format and I hate having to choose between $12 for the ebook version or $8 ($4 of which is shipping) for a paper version.

I was also aware of amazon's ebook prices being set by the publisher. They had a nice disclaimer on the page to be sure everyone knows. I cannot recall the source now. But from what I remember there was a story that amazon was dropping the price even talking a loss on the paper edition books from some of the higher priced ebook publisher (penguin?) in order to punish them for jacking up the prices of the ebook edition.

I never felt one way or another about Jobs. Big business always does whats profitable. Most of the time they get away with even illegal things. And even when the company loses a case like this it never really seems to hurt the president.

As to pricing

However, the claims that Apple, Macmillan, et ali make that they were trying to 'prevent a monopoly' are flawed at best.

There were e-books long before Kindle came on the market. Those have not gone away. I have a Kobo as my primary reader - it is my second. My roommie has a Sony - and has since before the Kindle hit the market.

Amazon is competing with the Adobe format e-books by providing better service, and less obtrusive DRM. (My first e-reader is full - it has a memory card, but the Adobe DRM does not allow it to be accessed for most of the commercial e-books.

The native software for the Kobo tries to cram them all in to the reader, and no longer plays nicely with Calibre. (It used to - but apparently the publishers asked them to change that....)

The Kindle stores info in a cloud and allows me to put books in the cloud and pull them out when I need them. I have less actual memory, but it is handled in a much more flexible manner. I prefer my Kobo - but the Kindle has infinitely better software.

The biggest single commercial publisher of e-books is Baen - which is not a big company, does not bother with DRM, prices e-books at less than the price of a paperback, and does not market exclusively to any one format. That word 'commercial' is important - Project Gutenberg is bigger. However - Baen plugs Gutenberg and Gutenberg plugs Baen. Baen even put the entire Gutenberg SF library, properly attributed, on a CD that was included in one of their books.

Baen sells more e-books than they sell books to Canada.

They use a different model than either the Agency model of Apple or the model used by Amazon - in part because they are their own distribution network for e-books.

They typically sell e-books for $6 or less - discounts in monthly bundles and a vast Free Library.

Most of the choke is not in the publishing industry, it is in distribution.

A flawed distribution model is part of what killed TSR. I suspect that it is crippling D&D for WotC.

The publishers are trying to use a flawed distribution model for e-books, and crippling their market in the attempt.

So, yes, greed really is at the root,along with not being willing to create a new model for distribution.

Plus, I think, a fear of piracy is causing them to fight against the format, with results that encourage piracy.... Much like WotC first charging the same for PDFs as they did for print books and then pulling PDFs entirely off the market.

Paizo charges a much more reasonable amount for their PDFs, and has much less of a piracy issue. (Or they are willing to ignore the piracy.) They make a good deal more on their PDFs than I think was likely the case for WotC.

The Auld Grump

*EDIT* I went to Subway, came back, finished my post, then hit Submit... only to find that Zenguy had already made most of the same points while I was noshing on buffalo chicken....

I do not care much for Apple or its products but I also do not care about them attempting to price fix. People will always find creative or innovative ways around what they perceive as unfair practices and I believe it can happen without government intervention. Baen appears to be a living example of this in the ebook arena.

Baen is what sold me on ebooks. And they are the only place I have ever bought ebooks from. And I have spent far more on their ebooks than I ever bought paper books. And I almost never buy new paperbooks anyway (maybe 5 new paper books a year).

And frankly I think they're missing the point of going to cheap esales. Maybe its true they get less per sale, but they sell more. I would totally pay $6 for an ebook, rather than even $4-$6 for a used book. And they get nothing from me buying used books.

Also I'm not sure I understand the advertising costs associated with ebooks, or really books period. Yeah every once in a while I see a commercial for a Grisham book but thats it. And I don't read Grisham. I find new authors using Amazon's "also bought" lists on the books I have read. Thats it, aside from the occasional recommendation from a friend or forum posting. Considering I read hundreds of books a year and don't even notice book advertisements, and don't buy those books when I do, I think they're wasting that money.

I suppose I get the book tour thing somewhat. Although personally I never want to meet an author I like. It can only ruin their books for me.

Once most books sales are ebooks you no longer have to buy store floor space and things. And don't need to extend credit to those stores either.

As I have been involved in this thread, I was reading an article in a local newspaper about how the one of the local library's book drive was way down over the past few years and they believe it is, in part, due to ebooks and streaming media. They usually raise around 100K/year from used books/DVDs/CDs which goes to support the library but they said donations are down as people switch to different forms of media consumption and less physical materials are purchased.

Obviously other factors are involved (i.e., the economy driving less purchases overall) but I thought this was an interesting effect in light of what we are discussing. I also did not realize there was such a big ebook selection at some libraries - this one said they will be focusing on building their ebook lending library collection.

Actually I find the library ebook selection a waste. My local libraries are a co-op so I can request books from any nearby library. But ebooks can only be checked out from my own city library. A selection that includes none of the new releases I'm looking for. Although the library 10 minutes from my house has them in their ebook selections. But I can only get their tangible media. Additionally from what I recall reading in an article (some, all?) publishers make the library buy another copy of the ebook every time its checked out (14?) times. That would seem to be very expensive for libraries. Especially since all the libraries near me are losing funding. And I know some publishers yanked their entire selection from elibraries over concerns about piracy. I think they were added back after a time, but I don't like the ability of publishers to do that.

Tor has just from their E-Books - following Baen and Angry Robot in that regard.

Thumbs up Tor!

The Auld Grump, just me, or are S.F. publishers more eager to grasp e-books than non-S.F. publishers?

Maybe. Perhaps its their customer base? Lot a techies. Perhaps theres an especially strong push in that genre for ebooks.

It is also possible that SF fans tend towards wanting to promote their hobby more than they want to pirate free books.

Then again, Baen has not had that much piracy, even though they use no DRM, so maybe it is just a matter of admitting that DRM is getting in the way of makin' a buck, and makes piracy more likely. (That is part of the reason that iTunes dropped their DRM on music - piracy was more likely, not less.)

The Auld Grump

Baen's policy of making so many ebooks free might also be responsible for their low piracy.

Definitely! I buy the grantville gazette bundles 6 volumes at a time. Baen's ruined me for other ebooks.

I wish the ebooks on amazon worked that way. I'd love to buy a whole series at a discount.