Buying ebooks is an incredibly frustrating experience!
No wonder the publishing industry is so hurting.
Most books are not even available as ebooks, and even when they are it is likely only in the United States of America, or at least that is the case for any book not on the New York Times Best Sellers List, which the majority of are fiction.
Here is a table of all the books I’ve bought from Amazon in the last 1.5 years for my Kindles:
Summary:
- I’ve bought 15 books.
- None of them are available in Canada at Amazon.ca!
- It cost me more to buy these books as ebooks than it costs in the USA for dead tree version of the books!
- Canadians pay more for dead tree books.
If I didn’t have a US address, then I would have bought zero books! Seth Godin’s Poke the Box isn’t even available on Kindle in Canada and it’s published by Amazon’s The Domino Project!
If you have information on the cost or availability of these books in other only stores or other countries, I’d love if you would share that data with me.
I find it incredibly frustrating how many books I go to purchase where an ebook either doesn’t exist or costs more than what a dead tree version costs. It makes no sense!
Rick Smith's The Leap costs 3 times more for the digital version
If I included all the books that I have not purchased the picture is even a lot grimmer. I end up borrowing from the local library the non-fiction or older books that I’m interested in — unfortunately many of them lately — rather than feel like a fool.
The UK is the only country where Consolations of Philosophy is only available on Kindle
Something has got to change. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the devices are (kindle3, ipad2) if you can’t get what you want to read.
I will close saying that one publisher is doing it well. If the Pragmatic Bookshelf has a book on a software topic I’m interested in, I will purchase it from them even if other tech publishers have a better rated book on the topic. The Pragmatic Bookshelf is the only ebook store that I know of that works.
