WARNING: Massive topic drift in progress!
Well, I took a look. I was rather amused, in a disturbing sort of way, by this one:
Quote:
In The days of The Comet by Wells, Herbert George
$5.95 $5.99 PDF
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So for $5.99, I can buy a $5.95 copy of a public-domain book. Maybe DRM'd. And in a format that generally looks terrible on my Sony Reader.
My natural snarkiness aside, I checked the SF section (please don't call it "sci-fi"). On the first page, only 7 of the 28 books are in epub. If that's representative of the percentages throughout, it's not promising. After some highly unpleasant experiences, I'm very gun-shy about PDFs; my Sony PRS-505 has issues with them, and conversion (when possible) to formats the 505 doesn't suck at displaying can be highly unreliable.
Incidentally, it actually took me a bit to realize there
was more than one page, since no feedback to the number of pages is provided unless you experiment with the dropdown box at the very bottom. While we're selling each other stuff, contact me by PM if you're interested in website work.
A page or two in, I found a book I might like to read -- one which I've been reluctant to buy in physical form due to fear of suckage and not wanting to waste cubic footage on it -- and it's even in epub. Yay!
Quote:
Dragonheart by Mccaffrey, Todd J.
$27 $16.99 EPUB
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Sticker shock!
Being the cheapskate I am, I did some price checking. Let's see, I could get a book that's almost certainly DRM-restricted for 17 bucks from you. Or I could get it on dead trees from Amazon for 8 bucks or from Borders (which, admittedly, would require me to actually go out in the sunlight) with this week's coupon for 5.35. I could buy it from the Sony store for 7.59, or buy the Kindle version and do unauthorized things to it to get it on my ereader for a bit over 6 bucks. Honestly ... why should I buy the book from you for over twice what Sony, Amazon, or the brick-and-mortar bookstores charge for it?
That's really not a promising introduction to EZbooks.
Or, to "Welcome to" as it shows on my tab bar (really, PM me about website work).
While I'm picking on
Dragonheart, here's the description of it:
Quote:
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Todd McCaffrey is the bestselling author of the Pern novel Dragonsblood, and the co-author, with his mother, Anne McCaffrey, of Dragon’s Kin, Dragon’s Fire, and Dragon Harper. A computer engineer, he currently lives in Los Angeles. Having grow
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I sense something ... missing ....
Also, there seems to be no ready way to tell if a book is DRM-restricted or not. Considering that DRM is a deal-killer for me, that's pretty much a sales-killer, since I don't want to find out the hard way.
I certainly haven't dismissed EZread entirely, despite the problems (and the page after page of covers all saying "My EZread" ). But the sticker shock, the format issues, the lack of DRM information, and the website itself haven't really sold me on the idea of buying books there.
We'd probably better take this to PM or something, though, lest the mods come down on us both for thread hijacking.