J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

Kindle Book Pricing And Document Titles

Amazon's Kindle 2 has been announced, and I ordered one. It's missing a few features that I would have liked, but I don't want to have to wait another year for the next version.

Several of my Excel books are available in Kindle editions. The price differential is much less than I would have thought. For example:

• Excel 2007 Bible (paperback): $26.39
• Excel 2007 Bible (Kindle): $23.75

So you save only $2.64 by getting the electronic version. You'll also save on shipping, since Kindle books are delivered electronically, free.

But guess what else...

CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

The CD that comes with the paperback book includes a PDF version of the book. Unfortunately, Kindle does not support PDF files directly. The PDF file can be converted, but I suspect that the conversion is less than optimal.

Something else caught my attention at Amazon's site:

Notice the HTML SUP (superscript) markup tag? There are at least 100 other Kindle books that have these tags in their title.

A friend sent me a photo of his Kindle displaying the sample version of my book:

Yep, the erroneous markup tags appear in the header of every page! And the "registered" symbol isn't even rendered. I hope that's only in the sample file, not the actual file.

I wonder if anyone even looks at these documents after they are Kindlized?

- Reader Comments -

Following are comments in response to this item.
The most recent comment is at the bottom.

1. By Tim Mayes. Comment posted 11 February, 2009 3:03pm

   John, I hope that you will a review after you get it. I was going to buy one yesterday, but then I started looking at it more closely. The first thing that worried me is the 6" diagonal screen. That seems kind of small, but I guess it isn't too bad. Then, I started looking at prices. The best seller's for $9.99 always gets the headlines, but many other books are barely cheaper than the dead-tree versions. Even older books (fiction) that are in paperback aren't much less expensive than actual books (maybe $1.50 less).
   
   Even after all of the great things that I've heard about Kindle, I just don't think that I can pay $350 for one without learning more.