To be perfectly honest, I don't buy the eBooks I read. I find free versions online & yeah, they tend to have typos & whatnot but I don't usually mind. The brain is amazing in what it's able to comprehend & it's rarely confusing when there's no period at the end of a sentence or there are random exclamation points in the place of lower case Ls.
I started out borrowing audiobooks on cd or Playaways at the library in Braintree but I have yet to visit the library where I live now. I refuse to buy audiobooks on principle because they are so expensive & since they are easily available at the library or online, why bother? My new mentor, Tony, loves audible.com. I keep thinking about that & might subscribe there in the future.
That said, I just went to Sony Reader eStore to look into buying the third book in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice & Fire (Game of Thrones is book 1) series. I also looked at Amazon for the paperback price. They are exactly the same cost: $8.99. I'm buying the paperback version. To me there's no question, always get the tactile version if they cost the same. eBooks need to cost less than their physical counterparts otherwise what's the point? I feel really strongly about this. People are spending lots of money on their eBook reader of choice & there are a lot of choices out there. Personally, I used to read books on my old Palm Treo phone back in the before-times. Luckily for me, my awesome & generous sister-in-law passes on her old Sony Readers to me so I don't have to spend oodles of money on one. For around two years I had an older version of the Sony Reader & it did me just fine. This Thanksgiving, she gave me an upgrade to the Sony Reader Touch edition & it's smaller & lighter than the last one which I'm re-gifting to a fellow reader. I can't say whom because that would spoil the surprise!
The reason I went looking for it at all is because I couldn't find a free version (ePub which is the file type I tend to read otherwise I go PDF or even audiobooks for which I use the same method of finding selections) online, the files had all been deleted - which I totally understand. I get that what I'm doing doesn't put money in the pockets of authors. But the way I look at it, this way I get to test out & try new (to me) authors & see if I like them. If I do & want to keep these books or share them with a friend, I will go buy a physical copy, usually paperback or trade paperback which is slightly larger & costs a few dollars more. I rarely want a hardcover book unless it's an all-time fave book or author (like Dennis Lehane - LOVE!). They are too unwieldy when trying to read them & too heavy to carry around conveniently.
Which gets me back to the convenience & portability of eReaders & why the prices for their content needs to go down. I understand charging 8-10 bucks for an electronic version of a new hardcover release but there is no reason that a paperback book should cost the same electronically & physically. I won't pay that kind of money for an e version so I'm going to keep doing what I've been doing, reading free copies.
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