Amazon Whispernet - What is it?

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I don't follow you. The technical book market is far smaller than the fiction market. When I get on a train or a bus, everyone around me is reading novels, not technical books. I suspect that it's a market sector which is of relatively little importance to a bookreader.

The textbook market is really the one that has me excited. College students must buy the textbook every semester (that is, unless we are sure we don't need it). The combination of not having to carry 15kg of books around but still have them with me is very attractive. Plus, a lot of students are spending Mommy's and Daddy's money, not their own.

It is a potential market that no other device has touched.

[HarryT]

But is a device with a 6" screen really suited for the purpose of displaying what are, presumably, PDFs? We all know the problems that can cause! That really is the one area where a device with a larger screen is a clear winner. It's an area in which, for example, the iLiad excels over the Sony Reader.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by HarryT

But is a device with a 6" screen really suited for the purpose of displaying what are, presumably, PDFs? We all know the problems that can cause! That really is the one area where a device with a larger screen is a clear winner. It's an area in which, for example, the iLiad excels over the Sony Reader.

The ebooks in question are described as Kindle editions, which can be automatically delivered to the Kindle. I do not expect them to be PDFs. I expect them to be AZW (assuming that is the Kindle format).

You are correct, though, in that they may not be well formatted for the Kindle's screen.

[HarryT]

Oh well, we'll know soon enough. As you say, it'll certainly be good news if a broad selection of textbooks is made available as eBooks.

[Lemurion]

I think the advantage of the textbook market is that while it's fairly low volume it's also a fairly high-dollar market. There are almost 17 million college students in the US, most of whom spend hundreds of dollars on textbooks each year; if Amazon can get each of them to spend $100 on textbooks in Kindle Editions, that would be over one and a half billion dollars a year.

The average student spends a lot more than $50 a semester on textbooks.

[nekokami]

If they can get the publishers to significantly drop prices on eTextbooks, the cost of the Kindle could be easily justified. Here's hoping....

[HarryT]

I suspect that, unfortunately, textbooks are always going to be inherently more more expensive to produce than novels. With a novel, all the publisher really has to do is have it proofread to make sure that it's written in reasonably OK English. With a textbook, on the other hand, they generally (at least in my field - physics textbooks) send the proof out to a group of people knowledgeable in the field to ensure that what it says is actually correct, which is far more work than merely ensuring that it's written in grammatically correct English. Textbooks generally also have lots of diagrams, figures, illustrations, etc, all of which push the cost up.

I don't think we're ever going to see the advent of the $10 textbook, unfortunately.

[Lemurion]

Actually a textbook price drop for Kindle editions could be quite doable-- not enough to likely make them cheap, but enough to make a difference in the price. Most have fairly small print runs and are large illustrated books, which means the physical production cost is higher than for novels. Kindle editions could work based on the savings possible in that area. If someone can get six textbooks for sixty or sixty-five dollars each rather than a hundred, that's a serious saving.

[CommanderROR]

I agree. However, with a small screen those "large illustrated" books might look a bit...off...and the lack of lolour could actually also be a problem here.

[Alisa]

Originally Posted by CommanderROR

I agree. However, with a small screen those "large illustrated" books might look a bit...off...and the lack of lolour could actually also be a problem here.

I think in general the reader devices aren't quite to the point of being ideal for the academic market, but something like the Info Pad concept would've been a godsend to me when I was in school. To be able to annotate and excerpt text, carry around all my books and not have to deal with those thick photocopied bundles of journal articles and chapters from out-of-print books that I had for every class would've been invaluable. I constantly found myself without the book I wanted at the moment because I had to guess every morning what I would need that day. My backpack could only hold so much. If it could do voice recording and let me take lecture notes on it, that would be even better. I would've happily paid iRex prices or more for such a thing.

[VillageReader]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

The average student spends a lot more than $50 a semester on textbooks.

I trust it was a typo and you meant $500. I spent over $100 a quarter - and that was in the mid 70's.

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by VillageReader

I trust it was a typo and you meant $500. I spent over $100 a quarter - and that was in the mid 70's.

I meant to say $50, meaning that Amazon would only have to capture a fraction of any given student's textbook purchasing dollar with Kindle to make a large amount of money. I know students spend about $500 a semester now-- and if they spent one tenth of that on Kindle Editions then Amazon would make a billion and a half dollars a year in gross sales.

[Alisa]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

I meant to say $50, meaning that Amazon would only have to capture a fraction of any given student's textbook purchasing dollar with Kindle to make a large amount of money. I know students spend about $500 a semester now-- and if they spent one tenth of that on Kindle Editions then Amazon would make a billion and a half dollars a year in gross sales.

I easily spent more than that each semester on photocopied "readers" (and this was over a decade ago). They were spiral-bound collections of articles and sometimes chapters of out-of-print books that the professor had produced at the local copy shops. This is the sort of thing that would be so easy to do in electronic format.

[ischeriad]

Just today I bought a reader for a seminar in Older German Literature containing two copied primary texts.

It has about 30 double sided pages, glue binding. The copy quality is not great, apparently its already a copy-from-copy. The original book pages have been scaled down, to fit up to four original pages on one page of A4 paper, so the page/font size is about that of a 6" reader. The illustrations are pathetic, copy of a copy of a reproduction of a wood carving of the 15th century...

Several people have occupied their time with these: Someone had to duplicate it, someone to bind it, and each of the probably 15 students who take this seminar have to walk to the secratary and buy one. The price is 3 EUR.

Edit: For the records, I have to buy books for about 65 EUR at the beginning of this semester.

[Alisa]

Originally Posted by ischeriad

Just today I bought a reader for a seminar in Older German Literature containing two copied primary texts.

It has about 30 double sided pages, glue binding. The copy quality is not great, apparently its already a copy-from-copy. The original book pages have been scaled down, to fit up to four original pages on one page of A4 paper, so the page/font size is about that of a 6" reader. The illustrations are pathetic, copy of a copy of a reproduction of a wood carving of the 15th century...

Several people have occupied their time with these: Someone had to duplicate it, someone to bind it, and each of the probably 15 students who take this seminar have to walk to the secratary and buy one. The price is 3 EUR.

Edit: For the records, I have to buy books for about 65 EUR at the beginning of this semester.

Wow. When I used to buy such things, they were more like $20/each. I wonder if you get a better price because your university is selling it to you. We had to go to a private shop that had photocopying services to purchase our readers. The professors would provide them with the materials and they would put the book together.