Quote:
Originally Posted by HansTWN
Depends on where you live. Here you can get very few foreign language books and those that you find cost 2 to 3 times more than US ebooks. And having them shipped costs a bundle. So I made my money back in no time, I get to read a lot of books I would otherwise never have a chance to read, and during my frequent travels (8 times a year for 15 days on average) I just take one reader with me. So it as frivolous as bread and water for me.
I understand the objections of both of you, but for many people ebook readers are more than good value for money.
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Guess I'm lucky I live in Taipei and can get most of the English books I read, sans research stuff and more archaic titles, from PageOne or Eslite with relatively little fuss for relatively decent prices. Some local bookshops will have the odd gem that I haven't seen elsewhere. The book I'm reading now, Jasper Fforde's "Lost in a Good Book" (excellent, btw), is more than $12 from FictionWise ($10ish if you're a club member), and I recall the price was fairly similar when I was looking through Fforde's books at PageOne. Of course there were a number of titles they didn't have in stock that I wanted, but the paperbacks they had were no more expensive than ebooks are for me. I generally get my Terry Pratchett stuff from PageOne, even though they only have the US covers and I'm a big fan of the minimalist black editions. I wouldn't consider the selection sparse really for a lot of modern popular fiction, but yeah it's not as comprehensive as the big online companies. Still, of all the books I picked up in the last few months, I've been able to find about 70% of them in bookstores here for pretty typical prices (mass-market or trade paperbacks). As a result, I still have more paper books than I have purchased ebooks, and I'm still considering picking up some Penguin Red Classics and other decent paperback versions of what I otherwise have as free but rubbish ebooks.
Of course that's with English, which is far more common than most other language titles here. For Japanese and Korean stuff, I tend to stick to the Chinese translations for convenience, and I'm lucky I can't read much in any other language.
