[OldCrank]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

To answer a couple of your questions:

1) The book selection, availability, and pricing will depend on the publisher as well as the store. Some publishers don't make their books available in all the stores. Some stores have exclusive lines (like Amazon's Encore or the Barnes & Noble Classics editions).

If a book is published by the Big 6 publishers (Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins), etc. then in the US and some other places their books are subject to what's called "Agency" pricing, which means that the publisher sets an absolute price for their books that the store/customer cannot discount in any way. So books from those publishers' imprints will always be the same price regardless of the store you buy them in.

Other publishers are more flexible about their pricing, and stores can offer discounts at their discretion. Kobo occasionally offers savings coupons which can be applied to those e-books, and Amazon sometimes has seasonal sales where they discount a selection of titles for a limited time.

2) The Kindle can take any non-DRM Mobipocket file format book without any special conversion. Many places, both free and paid, offer books in the DRM-free Mobi format. All you do is plug it into your computer via the USB cable and transfer it onto the reader.

You can also easily convert non-DRM books in just about any other file format using the free software Calibre, which has its own subforum right here on MR.

Unfortunately, for DRM books, Amazon does kind of lock you in to using their AZW or Topaz formats if you wish to read those titles on their reader without hassle, and does not even allow you to use the old-style DRM Mobipocket books which are still available in several places, even though Amazon bought and own the Mobipocket format.

3) There is at current no SD card capability for any but the really old Kindle 1 model. But the current K3 does hold 4GB worth of stuff.

4) In theory, Amazon could pull your books. But this basically happened only on two occasions and the kerfuffle was such that they did end up offering additional monetary compensation to affected customers for the books they pulled (one was a copy of Orwell's 1984 which had the regional selling rights set to the wrong country, the other was an illegal edition of the Harry Potter books which at the time J.K. Rowling was not allowing e-book versions of).

Everyone's pretty sure they won't do it again, because of the sheer bad publicity they got and nowadays their procedure for dealing with books that readers aren't supposed to have seems to be to offer a refund and/or leave the customers' copies of the books in situ while yanking them from the store catalogue. And as susan_cassidy mentioned above, they do have a generous e-book return/refund policy which the other stores tend to be rather recalcitrant about.

In any case, I would still advise downloading and keeping a local copy of each book file (and taking the time to learn to remove the DRM for backup purposes) no matter which reader/stores you decide to go with, because any store can shut down, taking your books with it regardless (Borders, HarperCollins' direct sales program, etc.).

It's too bad the Nook is unsuitable for you, because that would give you one of the widest choices available in terms of store variety, as the Nook supports 2 types of common DRM format (and I think it expands to 4 if you root the Nook and add in the Amazon Kindle for Android app and the eReader app).

Hope this helps, and welcome to MobileRead!

Thank you for taking the time to explain so much. DRM is a real issue for me and while I would not have much of a problem (ethically) stripping it. I just don't want to take the time and hassle to learn how to or to actually do it. I guess there's much more I need to think about.

If I go with one of the "etailer dedicated units" - Amazon or B&N, then all paid downloads are assigned to only the serial number of the unit? What happens if you sell it and want to buy a new one or it dies and you can't get a replacement right away?

The Nook (color) is out of my price range ($100 give or take a little) and besides, didn't they just pull all of them from the shelves when they realized everyone was rooting them and turning them into a full tablet? Won't they be coming up with a "fix" like a new "mandatory upgrade" to kill off any modified nooks? I mean they got to be really raw about all the hacking going on. I would think they will learn just like Amazon. The nook is also is not an e-ink reader?, but it is an LCD/LED backlit and I can't use LCD/LED backlit due to the headaches from eye strain.