I jumped on a Kindle ebook reader yesterday, after 4 things happened this week: Amazon released a new Kindle lineup starting at $79, my Amazon store card balance recovered from the Photoshop CS5 purchase a few months ago, I came into a ton of free ebooks earlier in the week courtesy of the Baen Free Library that I don’t like reading on my laptop, and I had also gotten to thinking that it’d be fun for me to get back into developing interactive fiction with a toy like this.
It arrived a couple of hours ago. Yeah, I opted for one day shipping because patience is not my strongest suit, and I didn’t want to wait until Monday or Tuesday to get it. I just ordered a second one about half an hour ago, as a matter of fact. It was the only way I could get the first one back from Mrs E, who spent most of the afternoon running around the duplex playing keep-away and triumphantly shouting that it belonged to her.
Anyway, about the interactive fiction thing: I’ve always loved choose-your-own-adventure books and text adventure games. They’re a fun programming challenge, have a retro charm, and unlike graphically sophisticated media like videogames or movies, the barrier to entry is much lower. All you need (besides the tools) is some imagination and the ability to write engaging prose, and the fact that it leverages skills that I don’t routinely use at work makes dabbling in interactive fiction a very enjoyable diversion for me.
The Kindle software development kit isn’t out of private beta yet, but that’s okay because I’m planning to write a web-based interactive fiction engine in PHP that serves Kindle-friendly webpages as output. It’s gonna be fun, especially since I want to use Guncrawl mechanics to handle task and combat resolution under the hood.
Wow! Much smaller than mine with the same 6" screen. But you don't have the keyboard, how does that work for you?
I LOVE my kindle. Not the best for pdf's, but still works okay. I converted all my lecture notes to kindle format for school. Made life much easier. Now if only I could get my course books in kindle format it would make my life so much easier.
I thought the lack of a keyboard would be a significant drawback at first, but on balance, I figured I was gonna spend something like 98% of my time just reading books, since I knew its built-in web browser and screen refresh rate was too slow for any sort of serious use.
If I want to browse the web or check email, there are better devices on the market for that purpose, and all I really want out of the Kindle is something that lets me store and read ebooks without my eyes crossing. Anything else can be handled by a phone, notebook, or proper tablet.
So, all things considered, using the onscreen keyboard with the 5-way controller doesn't bother me because I simply don't do enough text entry for it to become annoying.
I went for a nook color for other reasons, but the new Kindle (and impending tablet) would have altered my decision. My academic colleagues are all atwitter about the death of books, but they're all Luddites pining for clay tablets and a little cuneiform. Love my ereader and wouldn't go back–but I still buy "real" books, quite a few actually.
I absolutely love the idea of your programming choose your own adventure games–which is really all games like Dungeon Siege and Dragon Age are once you get past the graphics. Best of luck. I have bated my breath. Is the text ready yet?
Nice, but I'm still waiting on the Kindle pop-up book.
How much cheaper are the E-books for it?
Glenn: I like real books too. The primary advantage of an ebook reader, for me, is the ability to haul around a large number of books without busting a hernia, so it's great for traveling.
The choose-your-own-adventure game: I've been poking at it and getting a feel for how to set things up. I'll be posting links to the WIPs here so you guys can play them too. 🙂
Tommygun: Kindle books are kind of all over the map as far as pricing goes, but the average for a new book is 9.99. So, not really cheap. Bit more than a paperback, actually, and you're only getting a license to read. You can't share them like a real book either unless the publisher is one of the few enlightened souls who aren't firmly aboard the DRM train.
I wouldn't buy a Kindle solely to consume Amazon-only ebooks because that's…kind of a waste of money. It's better to buy books from someplace like Baen Books where the prices are generally lower and the books are DRM-free.
That aside, I'm actually more interested in using the Kindle for my own content, and that accounts for the largest portion of my willingness to buy it.
Yeah, ebooks are not as cheap as you'd think: there are NO warehouse costs, no shelves, pallets, workers, no distribution costs (gasoline, truck depreciation). Marketing costs (the getting it from factory to you marketing, not the adverts) are about 50% of retail cost in many cases. Right now, there's not enough competition. OTOH, my daughter uses her nook primarily for downloading library books–which she can do from anywhere in the world, so she's happy.
I disagree. Every e-book I have purchased so far has been £0.50 – £2.00 cheaper than paper back. The exception is academic books which rarely change price.
Granted I've only purchased e-books from amazon.co.uk and The Black Library.
I just saw the upcoming Kindle Touch and I'm pretty intrigued. I may purchase one for my father.
Glenn: Funny you mention library books, we just got our library cards the other day for that exact reason. The library setup here is kind of goofy, though–they actually have limited copies and waiting lists for *ebooks*, if you can believe that.
John: We never buy hardcover books, we're strictly paperback buyers, and we generally wait for the paperback version of a book before buying it. Kindle books are priced to be significantly cheaper than the *hardcover* first editions, but they're still a couple bucks or more expensive than paperbacks. (The average paperback price down here is about 7-8 bucks, while Kindle books tend to be around 10 bucks.)
I can also go to a discount bookstore or an used bookstore to buy paperbacks for five bucks or less. From that standpoint, Amazon ebooks aren't as good a value for the money as the real thing, and the only thing they have going for them is the convenience of weighing nothing and taking up no physical space. You also can't always loan them out to friends or buy one copy for the household unless you want to share your hardware as well, which defeats the purpose of everyone in the family having their own e-reader.
So, we would still end up buying real books, and the only ebooks we'd buy are the digital versions of the real books that we really, really, really want to have a digital copy of for whatever reason.
They're useful for me because I don't live near a bookstore and I don't always want to wait for a real book to come in the mail. Especially if I want it for a reference for something I'm writing. I have the Kindle app on my PC and my iPad, so everything I buy is available both places. It's generally worth the extra buck or two.
Will your interactive fiction work on iPad and PC as well as the Kindle device itself?
In theory, it should work on anything because it's a web app, so anything with a browser that has decent Javascript support should be able to run it.
In practice, it's being formatted for the 6" Kindle and coded with its limitations in mind. I would probably need to change the stylesheets to better support other device screens and capabilities.
My wife will read my kindle books by signing into my account on her iPhone.
John is right, as long as everyone in the house uses the same account you can all share each other's books. The downside is everyone knows what everyone else is reading, if that matters.
Yeah, I don't have a problem with other people knowing what I read. From an organizational and practical standpoint, however, I see two problems with shared accounts.
First, I haven't found a way to nest collections on the Kindle, and if you wanted everyone in the family to share the same account, you'd ideally want to have one master collection for each person, and sub-collections within those master collections so each person can organize their books. I mean, I don't think Mrs E wants to scroll past my whole Baen Free Library bookshelf just to get to the stuff she actually wants to read.
The other problem with everyone sharing the same account is if one person later decides they want their own account (so they can use all of the device storage for their own books, for example), that person immediately loses access to all Amazon ebooks under the joint account, and they can't be transferred. This isn't a big deal if most of your collection is free ebooks, but you're in "buy it all over again" territory with Amazon ebooks from my understanding of how the Kindle content ecosystem works.
Wait, with the Kindle app on the iPad I don't have to download every book I own. I do on my desktop so that I have a local copy, but I just keep a few on the iPad and maybe one or two on my phone.
The real problem is like you said, if someone wants their own account. There should be a way to transfer a book from one account to another. I don't mean copy, I mean I give it to you, I don't have it anymore, you do.
Also, I can leave my paper books to my niece and nephew. Can't do that with my e-book collection.
Becky
The nook allows each person to organize their collection (via individually created "shelves") on their machine, so my daughter's cookbooks and cleaning books (who knew there was a whole genre of books on cleaning the house) are neatly categorized on hers, and stuffed away on a separate shelf on mine (she does the same with my sci-fi). Consequently, each nook organizes the same collection differently. I thought Kindle had a similar feature.
I'm with Becky about ownership: if I pay for it, daggummit, it's mine–I should be able to dispose of it as I wish, including giving to Goodwill.
I keep all my ebooks filed on the pc, and up/download them to the kindle with Calibre, which will send convert them and set them up for my kindle DX.
This is a great boon – over the years I have accumulated a LOT of ebooks in a lot of formats. It didn’t matter when I read them on the pc, because all the readers were there – select the file and it opened in the appropriate reader. Now that i’m reading them on the kindle its nice to have a way to get it set up to page flow properly and display in a readable size (I WAS reading things as pdfs, but the text was deuced small, once I exported them into .mobi fgormat for the Kindle i can read the device while i work out at the gym (on the bike or the treadmill). Very convenient.
If you haven’t already found these skins, let me recommend them to you as a way to protect and identify your own device:
http://www.decalgirl.com/category.view/Amazon-Kindle-4-Skins
I’m still browsing these, looking for the one I REALLY want the most…