eReader Zone

Let me start this off by saying that I love my kindle. Hell, I just bought second one for my wife. So I am definitely a convert.However, I do have an issue with two things that relate to the kindle. First, pricing. It my opinion, it should ALWAYS be cheaper to buy the kindle version of a book. Period. I surrender quite a few rights when I buy a kindle version of a book – including the fact that I cannot gift my book to someone else (thereby making the publisher more money because each person has to buy their own copy). It is amazingly frustrating to come across books where the kindle price is more than the cost to buy the physical book.I get that I am getting more convenience with an ebook, but I am also giving up quite a bit. The biggest being not being able to gift or re-sell the book.What is more annoying is that Amazon seems interested in keeping this fact as obscured as possible. It is ONLY in the kindle section where when you look at the detail page of a book, you do not see all the other versions of the book available with their associated costs. Why do you suppose that is? It would seem clear that Amazon has some degree of fear that if the pricing from ebook to paperback to hardcover were transparent, it might cause trouble. I would think it would at least cause more complaining.I suppose we have to acknowledge that much of this probably plays into what publishers do, rather than Amazon. So perhaps Amazon deserves some slack in terms of determining price – but they deserve NO slack when it comes to basically hiding the price differences between the versions of the books. This information should be displayed just as prominently when viewing books in the kindle sections as it is in any other section.With any luck, this issue and other DRM related issues will work itself out. In the music world, there have been lots of changes, those of us who have stepped into the ebook world can only hope that the same kinds of changes and realizations happen for us as have happened for music.R

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