My anger will not subside until I get that free iPad and $500 gift card.

Or Jeff Bezos leaves a lip print on my left butt cheek.

I suggest the iPad and gift card. It’s cheaper than travel expenses, and I’ll even buy Amazon ebooks if there’s a Kindle app for that.

See? I’m almost reasonable.

And for what it’s worth there were several disgruntled kindle users who were very frustrated with amazon and felt from the start that amazon should let the customers decide if the price is worth it. they kept getting beaten down and finally seem to have given up posting.

and on that note, I feel like the kindle forums posters are severely overestimating the popularity of ebooks in the present and very near future. I don’t know a single person who reads exclusively e-books or who would prefer to read only e-books. Even the readers I know who own an e-book reader have a strong preference to own at least some print books because they enjoy having a collection on their shelves.

Mark you, I’m in the camp who won’t be buying either Amazon’s too aptly-named Kindle – after Orwellfail, they might as well have called it the Farenheit 1984 and been done with it! – or the overpriced, DRM-infested Potable Lead Editions that Macmillan seems to be pinning its hopes on. There is nothing for me in today’s e-books, and I don’t want to see resale price maintenance creeping in again on the sly either. Not even if I get published, and stand to gain literal polybucks from it.

But I don’t have to buy e-books. Amazon doesn’t have to sell e-books on terms it doesn’t like. Where did it think it got off vanishing all the print titles from customers used to treating it as a reliable middleman?

It has indeed been a crude chain-grocer’s hissy fit, and it has burned a bit too much of its brand with me this time, and I shall be spending my hardly-earned pennies through friendlier booths for quite some while to come. Upon the same authors, however!

Amazon was happy to sell MP3s without copy protection once the studios were willing to sell it to them; I don’t think this is about keeping a Kindle infrastructure as much as it is about creating a viable ebook business.

That would be okay as long as Amazon pays the publisher based on their MSRP and not the actual sale price. The book keeping on that would be sticky. Plus, keeping new release and best selling e-books up a bit helps to encourage hardcover sales, which is good for the industry as a whole, since hardcovers can be purchased from any book seller. If an e-book is $15 and the hardcover is $22, I might just go down to the bookstore and pick it up (and I would own it, could lend it, etc…).

I’ve worked in retail (selling music equipment) and I know that manufacturers (and therefore publishers) often have contracts that specify, at the very least, lowest price that their products may be sold. There is much more to it than simply one store’s profit margin versus another’s.

People seem shocked at this and the other controlling moves Amazon has made regarding Kindle titles, but come on people, you’ve bought into a fully controlled environment – that’s fine, but at least do it with the awareness that you can only get Kindle titles at Amazon and you can only read them on a Kindle or using a Kindle app developed for another device by Amazon…. and that they have the technical capability to remove or alter any title on your Kindle.

At this point I’m far more interested in a Nook that seems to use ePub as a format and has a limited ability to lend books.

You make a website fast by putting the information multiple places, which also makes it slow to change. See: the gay/lesbian book kerfuffle.

Check out his take on e-books and their effect on the reader-author relationship.

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/257719/december-01-2009/sherman-alexie