Ebooks in NZ

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sbowness

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#374387 30-Aug-2010 08:35

farcus:
networkn: Hopefully this won't upset anyone, but I am thinking of trying the $139 kindle, but I was curious to know if there was any source of books for the kindle format that wasn't the kindle store at amazon, a few google searches found me a few samples for my sony E-reader, does such a sample system exist for the kindle or do they dial back all the time?

You could always buy epub format books from Whitcoulls and use Calibre to convert to mobi format and transfer to your Kindle.

Most of the books on sale at Whitcoulls have DRM which Calibre cannot handle. You can generally get the same books from kobobooks.com at a better price and you don't have to battle with the Whitcoulls website.

If you are after classic, public domain books (generally those older than 1932) there is a tremendous collection at the Gutenberg Project www.gutenberg.org

Quinny

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#383132 22-Sep-2010 12:38

My Kindle 3 arrived last week and I as suggested above have used Calibre to format and move quite a few books over. It works very well and will convert many formats to mobi for the Kindle very well.

The books from Amazon have all downloaded quickly and with no issues and are sync'd for how far I am through them on my iphone Kindle app and on the Kindle itself.

The selection of Asia Pacific is lower than that for the US but there is still plenty to choose from and costs are usually under $15 NZ instantly delivered. You cant really complain.

I purchased the Wifi only model in the end as there is some suggestion that browsing on the 3g can incur some nasty charges. Wifi only works just fine and has better battery which was more important for me.

The screen is stunning and wonderful to read from. My only complaint is all the very nice pretty tags and sorting in Calibre was wasted as none of that moves over to the Kindle on transfer. You need to manually sort all your books into Collections and you cannot have a nested Collection of say Author then Series.

I have several friends with solid sized ebook libraries already as they were early adopters at around $400-$600 a reader. They went for iRiver and Sony about 1-2 years ago and the screen is definitely better than these. The good thing for me is the vast majority of their files do not have DRM and so I had a nice ready made library.

Do be aware with the Kindle that the lack of epub could be an issue if NZ libraries move to online borrowing as this is the dominant format in the US for library sharing.

networkn

Networkn
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#383135 22-Sep-2010 12:48

I got my kindle and I love it. The screen is beyond belief compared to my prs-600 sony, though I miss the touch screen and holding it one handed occasionally I hit the button for next page unintentionally. The amazon download process is amazing. I got the wifi only model.

ScottStevensNZ

245 posts

Master Geek

#383157 22-Sep-2010 13:53

networkn: I got my kindle and I love it. The screen is beyond belief compared to my prs-600 sony, though I miss the touch screen and holding it one handed occasionally I hit the button for next page unintentionally. The amazon download process is amazing. I got the wifi only model.

Good to hear - I ordered my kindle yesterday and can't wait for it to arrive :)

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khull

1245 posts

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#383196 22-Sep-2010 14:49

ot btw if you have an ipad you can open both kobo and kindle ebooks with drm purchases since they are tied to the account, not to the device.

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