Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
Unless you're a person who has to read the lastest books as they come out it's easy to buy ebooks cheaply. I get an email about sale books from Bookbub and Book Gorilla every day. Typically I'll find a book I want to read about every other day and if it's $2 I'll buy it. If it's $3 I'll think about it. Often they're just $1. Prices above $3 are uncommon and most are $2.
A lot of those are older books and that's fine with me. I just began a book published in 1990, and that's probably one of the newer books I've read this year.
We live in a world of choices. We can choose to read expensive books or we can choose to read inexpensive books. It's up to us.
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True and not true really.
If you buy just based on cost, then you are correct.
If you buy into an author and especially a series, things are not so easy, especially if an ongoing story and each book is an incomplete part of an ongoing whole. Take the author I have already mentioned, Robert Jordan. His Wheel Of Time series really needs to be read as a whole.
Prices for each ebook in the series are rarely determined in advance, especially when still in development. So you either hold off until the series is complete or you take a punt. Once you take a punt though, you are at their mercy, and while you can say it is still a choice, you are kind of making redundant in many instances, the money you have already spent, if you decide not to buy any more ... especially if you are yet to read your prior purchase(s).
There are of course a few ways to look at these things, and what we call an unspoken agreement between the customer and the author/publisher of a series.
And of course, some books in a series are quite independent to the others.
BookBub is great by the way, as you know. I use it a lot, as it helps me wade through the huge number of choices out there. Not used Book Gorilla.
I'll diverge for a moment, though it is of course related.
While being interested in ebooks since first the idea was ever mentioned, it took me a good while before being willing to pay for an ereader. AUS like many countries, is a year or five behind many USA things. So it wasn't until the Kindle Keyboard became available here in AUS and at a sale price, that I took a gamble and bought one. It was a gamble for a few reasons, the most important one being the reading experience. It kind of stacked up logically, but that could just be flawed due to unknown aspects.
Luckily a mate had bought one not long before, and I got to play with it at his house. It also had a nice leather cover with builtin light, both of which impressed me greatly. So I didn't go in blind. But even on sale it was still quite an outlay.
I had done my homework though and the Kindle Keyboard was very convincing, and I had also been collecting ebooks for years in readiness, especially from The Gutenberg Project. So I was kind of well prepared, me having no interest in buying ebooks from Amazon at that point, especially as no PayPal, and I severely restricted who had access to my credit card details.
In fact, it was while I was away in another state on holidays, just after buying the Kindle, and taking it with me of course, that I changed my mind about Amazon. I was in a big department store, and they had a display stand in an aisle which had great looking paperback books by an author I did not know - C.J. Box. The titles grabbed me as did the covers. They were going for $10 AUD each, which was about half the usual cost of a paperback. The blurb on each sounded like a story I could really enjoy, with a great setting to boot.
I nearly bought one, but decided I would check prices online when I got back to the hotel I was staying at, my phone only having Wifi.
At that point, AUS did not have its own Amazon store, so I had to use the main one. I found those same books by C.J. Box were going for between $6 and $7 at Amazon. I then made a snap decision to let Amazon have my credit card details and I bought his first book, in the Joe Pickett series, and I have been buying them ever since ... over 20 of his ebooks now. I then looked at other ebooks by Piers Anthony and others I collected, and many were a pleasant surprise cost wise ... and here I am, some 2500+ Kindle ebooks later. To be fair, just over 1700 of those now are freebies I have gotten via BookBub. Still, it is getting close to 900 I have actually paid money for at Amazon. I've also bought a few from other places.
It was price that did it for me, and price it remains.
My initial intent was to use the Kindle Keyboard just for the free ebooks I had collected. I was quite happy reading physical books, several thousand of which I have. I am well and truly a collector ... even wanted to be a Librarian, but no jobs for male librarians back in the day, so I eventually became a Fireman instead ... who have a fair amount of time for reading, especially on night shift. I used to read in excess of 100 books a year, but family and other interests have intruded now. That might not seem like many to some, but a fair number were Fantasy epics, between 800 to 1000 pages each.