ebooked, line and sinker

Running out of space for books in my house, world running out of trees, want to do my bit and save money as well as space. Silly me. After deciding on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 rather than a Sony ereader because I want to be able to put down my book and check my email without changing devices and I never get enough time to read so my eyes probably wont fall out with the back lit display I then turned to the horrid reality of ebooks. Talk about rip off! Geez guys! There's no printing production or transport costs for Christ's sake! Sure you've got electronic warehousing and interface costs but really, they aren't all that much and you had to do that before anyway. I approve of paying the author for writing a book and the publisher for making it available but not of subsidising the physical production and warehousing and transport costs of the physical editions. Be fair chaps!

Then it appears I can buy (some) ebooks from Amazon as long as I use their Kindle reader app (OK - If I can download it and I'm pretty sure someone has cracked their proprietary ebook format so I can save it for later). Or I can rent a book from Google, read it anywhere on any device provided I have an internet connection. But I can't have the file. Makes it a bit harder to give the book to someone else to read. Or I can use Kobo or one of the traditional publisher websites or bookshops. Little did I know.

Then there are the search engines. Give me strength.

Just searched for Together: The rituals, pleasures and politics of co-operation by Richard Sennett which as followers of my micro publishing empire would know is about ways to combat tribalism. It's sociology. Kobo turned up lots of suggestions from their bondage department with titles like Teach Me, Daddy, Girls on Girls: 7', Way Beyond Whipped and my personal favourite The Babysitter is a Good Girl for Daddy. I haven't read any of the works of Lolli Love but I'm reasonably sure they aren't sociology.

Presumably the Kobo take on tribalism is that the best way to fix it is to distract the guys with submissive chicks who are absolutely gagging for it. Or not. I suspect Kobo's search engine needs to look at the genre tag when offering alternatives. They also want $22.89 for it. Amazon UK wants $24 (plus postage the bastards) for a hardback copy which I submit your honour will way outlast my computer system. Amazon doesn't have a Kindle ebook for it for Australian denizens - if I was a Yank it would be $18.10, but the Amazon is apparently antipodean. There's no Google ebook either though at least the search brought up alternatives like Origin of Group Identity and Gossip and the everyday production of politics rather than Shag Me Senseless Big Boy.

Further trolling and I tried Barnes & Noble who had it as a Nook ebook for US$15.40. That's more like it! Is there an Android App? Yes! Hooray! But is this an aberration? And will I be locked into yet another proprietary format?

Another test: looked for Alain de Boton's Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion. Kobo's got for AU$9.99 but B&N want $13.99 for it. Damn. I need something to help me buy the ebook at the best price (to help offset the cost of the Samsung and because I'm cheap) but also something to help me keep it all together because if I use multiple stores they are all going to put the files in weird places on my tablet. That's assuming I decide to put them on the tablet at all and not on my main PC which I back up into the cloud with DropBox as well as onto physical media from time to time (not often enough despite having suffering the torments of the damned by losing lots of stuff over my 20+ years of computing - will I ever learn?).

It all makes logging into Amazon and paying their disgraceful mail charges almost worthwhile. Stay tuned (not)!

[This was a FB note from Monday, 5 March 2012 at 23:12 that subsequently disappeared and was only rediscovered by dutiful help searching FB. Sort of suggest they don't want people posting more than a few lines at a time, presumably because the mobile young FBer has a fairly short attention span, or at least so they believe anyway.]