4 ms·
Kindle user here. Started out by downloading a handful of books from various authors whom were recommended to me. After seeing how poorly formatted some pirated
by JonLim 15y ago
Kindle user here. Started out by downloading a handful of books from various authors whom were recommended to me. After seeing how poorly formatted some pirated books were, I downloaded some samples of other books, and the formatting was great.
Went and bought a whole whack of books right after that. I pirated the first book in Song of Fire and Ice (Game of Thrones) and bought the rest because I loved the book so much.
So yes, Amazon has played this arena VERY well, in my opinion.
- notatoad 15y agokindle user here. started out by downloading a handful of books from torrent. after seeing how poorly formatted some were, i started buying books from the kindle store. after the third or fourth book i bought, i realized amazon doesn't do any better a job than the pirates do. as long as you download single books and not packs of .doc files, the formatting is probably better on pirated books in my experience.
- JonLim 15y agoDepends on the book! A lot of my Chuck Palahniuk pirated books were so poorly formatted that I just decided to buy the damned thing after viewing how good the sample was.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- NolF 15y agoI've had quite the same experience. Downloaded some books, started reading it, and after enjoying the book so much, the little formatting errors were too much and decided to buy the book.
- FilterJoe 15y agoI've used both a Kindle and Nook and found the formatting of books in stores to be poor for the majority of books (but not all). I get out-of-copyright classics (or public domain books) now from places like Feedbooks and Manybooks which do a much better job of quality control on the formatting. Feedbooks.com is my favorite but they only have a few thousand books.
- mahyarm 15y agoAre you mostly buying/downloading free out-of-copyright books from the amazon store?
- FilterJoe 15y agoWhen I had a Kindle, I first mostly bought free or very low cost books from the Amazon, though I checked out excerpts of more expensive books sometimes. Virtually none of them contained waypoints, and only a small fraction had table of contents when warranted. Graphics were terrible across the board (captions on a different page, not appropriately sized, etc. - try reading a Curious George sample to see how terrible it is). If Amazon wants me to invest hundreds of dollars in buying books on their store, they're going to have to do a better job - perhaps some minimum quality guidelines.
- mahyarm 15y agoDid you try more contemporary books, like recent best sellers and so on?
- FilterJoe 15y agoI peeked at a few but didn't buy. Many books are just a long novel with no graphics. For such books, the Kindle store is fine as there are no issues with graphics or missing TOC or waypoints. But when I peeked at books that should have table of contents, quite a few of them didn't - even recent popular books. I didn't do an exhaustive survey by any means, but the few full-priced (at least somewhat) popular contemporary books I checked out on both Kindle and Nook were better done (on average) on the Nook, as table of contents were more often included with Nook books. To me - the fact that I should have to examine quality when paying $10 for a book is inexcusable. In a physical book store I don't have to worry about these things. EDIT: replaced "chapters" with "table of contents"
- JonLim 15y agoI tried to get into out-of-copyright classics but I just can't read them. Call me stupid or uncultured but I prefer a good fiction book that is light hearted and will get me through my commute. Are those really much better formatted though?