Open Thread: eBooks

It's a Monday open thread!

Last week, mmy made a great comment about eBooks being gateway drugs that hook people on eReading. I know they were for me: I bought my eReader last year with the firm and full intention to ONLY download public domain classics and free library books and now I have..... er, at least 600 books on my B&N nook library alone.

Which I know because when I had to call B&N this week to clear up a nook/credit-card conflict (my old card was expiring and had to be updated), the lady on the phone kept saying, "Wow, you've bought a LOT of books with us..."

How many eBooks do you have? Are they all freebies and public domains, or do you have paid ones as well? What do you think about eReading in general?

OPEN THREAD BELOW!

13 comments:

Yamikuronue said...

The one thing I hate is when the ebook editor is too lazy to format the book properly. I left a bad review on a book recently because it was a book of short stories that didn't even put a blank line between stories; the line immediately following the last sentence in one story is the title of the next, no bold or header or anything. It can make it hard to realize you've finished the story you're on

valarltd said...

I lost count around 400. I think I've bought maybe a dozen of them. A fair few are my own, my novels and shorts, or anthologies that I'm in. Some have been prizes or freebie giveaways. Most have been either Project Gutenberg or promotional give aways from Tor or All Romance Ebooks (which gives away over 20 books a year).

I've been writing ebooks since 2004 and reading them just as long. I miss my Sony 505, which died earlier this winter.

Ana Mardoll said...

Agreed, so much, although I'm learning that stores make it really hard to format books. EPUB is an open standard and my book ePUB is beautiful, but only B&N accepts ePUBs directly. Amazon wants a mobi file which can only be gotten from an epub-to-mobi CONVERSION (which can be very fussy, can't be tweaked directly, and took me hours to get perfect), and Smashword-Kobo-Sony want a word document for conversion. Cue hair-pulling and Ana sobbing loudly. :)

Redwood Rhiadra said...

I've got rougly eight hundred "books" on my Kindle right now. Of which maybe 35 or so are things I paid for, another 50 or 60 are from the Baen Free Library or the CDs Baen inserts in their hardcovers, and the other seven hundred or so are amateur fiction or fanfiction downloaded from the web and converted to Mobi format.

And my friend Mitch Wagner was trying to convert his short story to Smashword last week, and noted on his blog that it was amazingly frustrating because the only instructions available are for a very *old* version of Word for XP, which bears no resemblance to the more recent Word for Mac version he's using. And Smashword is apparently *very* picky about how that Word document is formatted.

And since it's an open thread, I'll pimp my review of his story (tl;dr version: I liked it): http://redwoodr.tumblr.com/post/17718551617/review-the-biggest-man-in-lilliput-by-mitchwagner

icecoldblank said...

I always said that I would never switch to e-books because I loved the feel of a good heavy book in my hands.

And then I got the free Kindle app on my iPad.

Now, I have a kindle, which I carry everywhere, and I download 5-10 free e-books a week, and I watch the kindle daily deals and buy lots of other books too. I actually need to stop buying for a while, so I have time to catch up on reading, but I love shopping for books as much as I love reading them!

Fluffy_goddess said...

Oooh, yeah. When my parents bought me my Kobo for Christmas, the salesguy apparently said that they don't make money off the ereader itself, but they make huge amounts off accessories and ebooks. I bought myself a gift card for $50 and went through most of it in a single month -- mostly books that cost $0.99 or $1.99, but one that was a set of the Dante Valentine books for something like $15.

Most of what's on my kobo was free, though. And a lot of it was fanfiction (whoever set up the download-as-epub feature on AO3 deserves sainthood, seriously).

Though I've run into my first kobo-related problem now, and it's proving not terribly easy to get fixed, so we shall see. Tier 1 support team sent my issue to Tier 2 promptly... tier 2 has not confirmed receipt of problem.

Loquat said...

I don't have an exact figure, but my books take up about 5 pages on my Kindle's main menu, so I think it's less than 100 - not terrible for having only gotten the thing 6 months ago, but still unwieldy to navigate. It's at the point where I really need to figure out how to make Kindle put them all into bins so I don't have to flip through the whole list every time I buy a new one. Coincidentally, my temp job answering phones for a health insurance company also started 6 months ago, and the Kindle was great for occupying myself in between calls (the company had nothing for us to actually do when nobody was calling, except re-read the health plan literature we'd already been trained on.) Now that that job's over I find myself doing a lot less e-reading.

Naomi Kritzer said...

I don't have an exact figure either, but I've bought a lot more than I was willing to admit while angling for a Kindle as a birthday present.

Rikalous said...

You know, I used to think having seventy or so kindle books was a lot. Apparently I've barely got any.

depizan said...

I have...five. Yeah, the whole ebook thing doesn't seem to be catching on with me. This would be why I sold the Nook a friend gave me when she bought a better Nook. (Though, the fact that Nook "paper" is this awful dingy gray really wasn't helping there.) I've got every kind of ebook app I know of on my iPad (ibooks, Kindle, Nook, Overdrive*), but I haven't even read the five ebooks I've got. ... Oh, I guess I've got six, at present, since I checked an ebook out from the library just to see how that worked.

I write on my iPad all the time. But I've written on a computer of some sort since I was 13. But somehow when it comes to reading, I'm still more of an actual book person. I'm not sure why.

*Program that some public libraries - like mine - use for ebook loaning.

BC Brugger said...

Two years ago the sump pump under our rental stopped working. AND we only found out about it when a release valve blew up a few days later.

No, wait, come back this really is relevant to the question at hand.

We live in Oregon. Standing water 5 inches deep under the house. Landlord had a guy fix it all ect ect ect.

Couple of months go by. I reach into one of our ten six-foot-tall bookshelves for something and discover that six of the bookcases are soaked through from the back and bottom (against the wall and out of sight). We lost several hundred books, many of them out of print. I cried the whole time we were cleaning it up and for a week afterwards.

We both have Nooks now. I am perfectly happy to get free or not too pricey ebooks. I am also perfectly happy to pay for an ebook I don't want to wait for or ones I lost in the Great Mold Disaster.

I've bought a lot of those '50 classic science fiction/mystery/whatever' and Complete Works of (insert classic author here). They cost very little and sometimes a girl just needs to read some Oscar Wilde while waiting in line, you know?

Ana Mardoll said...

That sounds so awful. I'm so sorry that happened. :(

BC Brugger said...

It was... not-happy-making. But, you know, even beloved Stuff is still just Stuff. After 25 years our bottom line is we're still here and still together and we can always buy, if not the exact same Stuff, more Stuff.

Or as Spousal Unit pointed out- in the event of an actual evacuation level emergency, it would be a heck of a lot faster to just grab the Nooks as opposed to trying to pack all those books.

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