Image taken from amazon.co.uk
I’m sure I spend as much time thinking about what books to buy next as I do actually reading them. There’s something satisfying about choosing a book and subsequently enjoying it. I don’t always enjoy them but then I don’t always enjoy films that I go to see at the cinema. Only now it is more expensive to see a film (£7.20) than it is to buy a book (averaging £4-5). Books however take considerably more time to experience than a film does so it is equally important to pick the right one and not pick up any old thing floating around the bookshelves.
After pumping a small fortune into my petrol tank on the way home from work I had a quick rethink about my spending habits. VAT and TAX increases are crippling my spendthrift nature but then as VAT is not applied to books perhaps I am not so injured by the … erm … moneythirsty government / budget guys (it’s almost painful for me to hold back on the torrent of pent up frustration on this off-topic).
I’ve experimented with the open source book app on my (Android) phone Aldiko but the format is incredibly inhibiting plus the screen on my phone is so tiny I barely get about twenty words on a page (at a readable size). I downloaded a few books that are now out of copyright to read but I struggle with the format so much that I can’t enjoy them as easily as if they were in paperback.
I then had a peek at the grown-up version of this, the Kindle, which apparently is the highest rated product on Amazon’s site. The fact that it is their product does not induce any cynicism whatsoever … ho hum.
Based on a selection of four books knocking about my “Basket” the price to purchase these books on the Kindle was barely different to buying it in paperback, in one instance it was more expensive to buy it via Kindle. Considering that the Kindle now costs between £111 and £152 plus the minor savings made on ebooks, it hardly seems cost effective for now. My bookshelf only cost me £90 but then it probably only holds about a 100 books, not the 3.5k that the Kindle boasts! One day … one day … my ‘bookshelf’ will be a small library.
All prices true at time of publication JAN 2011 – current prices may now vary.
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