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Comment by ballenf | Hacker News Reader

The biggest issue I have with publisher websites is the lack of a strong review ecosystem. I've started looking at Amazon or industry blogs for reviews and recommendations, but that gets frustrating and is slow.

Just wonder if the publisher could arrange to get rights to it's books' reviews across seller sites and aggregate the results. The truth is, apart from occasional sales like this, the publisher sites are rarely in price competition with any other sellers.

But as far as Amazon goes, I'll buy the books in paper (or pay more for DRM-free) to avoid the Kindle DRM and being locked into one ecosystem. It almost feels like a luxury to be able to loan out or give away paper books. Kindle books just feel more like renting a book than owning it. Which is, legally, probably a closer metaphor for the transaction.

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I'm pretty sure if you buy a book from No Starch and have serious complaints, Bill would probably refund you. They are really one of the most community friendly publishers out there.

I used to worry about that, then I realized that I've book 3 copies of some physical books I like - I read them enough times that I wore 2 copies out. Now I realize that it doesn't actually matter that I can loan paper books as I rarely do.

Cheap paperbacks wear out quick, I wish hardcover was available after books come on paperback because the books I like in paperback I go back to look for hardcover but by then hardcover is out of print. Though often I can find a library edition which is starting to become my default for paper books.

For technical books, I can't replicate the experience of writing notes in the margins (with a pencil of course) of a paper book versus anything ebook readers offer. Yes, I can't grep or query a paper book but the learning process seems more fluid as the book becomes my own reference source.

You might not like it but many ebook readers have annotation support. Usually you can highlight text and add notes. In the case of Kindle, you can later find all your highlights and notes on:

  https://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights

There are browser add-ons that make this page better and easier to export. One example is http://www.norbauer.com/bookcision/ which will allow you to download your notes in XML, JSON or plain text.

Personally, I don't use the online notes page. I am more than happy with the device showing me my own notes. There are also options for showing popular notes and highlights.

I agree that it is not frictionless like pen and paper, which I also love, but for those like me that live in far away countries where up to date books are expensive and hard to find, being able to use ebooks from abroad and use the notes features is a blessing.

Thank you for linking to that export utility!

I use Kindle Highlights very heavily while doing research, I then export them for use while writing. That extension will save me a bunch of time.

Do you think an iPad Pro would work for you? I just bought one and the ability to mark-up PDFs has turned out to work great. It does a good job of recognizing my handwriting and so when I search for some term, it also finds matches in my handwriting.

There are a bunch of different apps for this and none of them are expensive.

Thank you. Is there a particular PDF app that you use?

Notability and GoodNotes are both very good. GoodNotes fits my brain a little better, so that's what I've been using. Both are around $10.

I don't have a problem with reading reviews on Amazon and then buying direct from the publisher.

"The truth is, apart from occasional sales like this, the publisher sites are rarely in price competition with any other sellers."

Is this really true? I usually by ebook/pbook combo and I find that I get a better deal directly on the publisher's website. Amazon is a non starter for me because I don't buy into their ebook format. "ebook" to me means epub and pdf.

I am involved with ebook production for an academic publisher. I sometimes joke that I am going to have "that doesn't work on the Kindle" engraved on my tombstone.

A post listing some of these things (things that doesn't work on the kindle, not tomb stones) would be very interesting

For instance, if a book has an embedded jpeg, you can tap it and enlarge it to fill the screen. But if it is SVG art (as we often use for line art like charts and maps), it will not scale. Why not? I don't know. There is no support for MathML, or for scripting of any kind. Support for embedded video is poor. Page lists are suppressed in favor of Amazon's own proprietary system. Note that epub readers like Calibre and Apple iBooks can manage these things. It is intrusive about formatting: it may decide that your lists need to be bulleted whether you want them or not. It always underlines links, which is a pain with note callouts. These behaviors may be inconsistent across devices.

Adobe Digital Editions supposedly supports most of the epub standard, but is a buggy mess, esp. the Windows version.

> These behaviors may be inconsistent across devices.

The image handling inconsistencies are very annoying. Here is what I've seen with several books.

1. When read on an eInk Kindle, images are small. (I can tap them to bring up the option to zoom, and zooming does work, but it is kind of ugly). For example, I've seen chess books where the diagrams are about twice postage stamp size, whereas in the physical book they are about 3 or 4 times as big in each dimension.

2. When read on the Kindle desktop application on Mac, the images are bigger. As far as I can tell when I've been able to compare to the physical book, they are the correct size.

3. When read on the Kindle desktop application for Windows, the images are small like they are on Kindle eInk readers.

4. When read in the Kindle cloud reader, they are the right size like on the Mac desktop application.

5. When read on iPhone with the iOS Kindle app, the images are small.

The main places I've noticed these are with chess books, where the position diagrams are the victims, and math books, where diagrams are the victims, and often also equations if the equations are done as images.

Image sizing is a tricky issue. When ebooks started to become a more mainstream thing, image size in the file was limited by the vendors, and also we sometimes had third-party licensing restrictions. Over time, of course, devices got more memory and higher-resolution screen, so larger file sizes are allowed, or even desirable. However, consistent behavior is still elusive. And that's even assuming optimal coding on the part of the publisher or whoever is doing their conversions; they may be using files that are not adequate for the higer-res screens.

Good point! I guess I'm thinking in terms of dividing the market into 3 types of products: paper copy, locked-down DRM copy, DRM-free ebook. In 2/3 of those, Amazon and publishers don't compete. And on paper copies, publishers usually sell at list price with Amazon priced sometimes significantly less.

There's also a 4th type which is the used paper copy, where publishers kind of by definition don't compete.

Regardless, that's my admittedly naive rationale for why Amazon or other retailers shouldn't mind sharing review data with the publisher for use on its site.

Kindle versions of most of the tech books would be $21-23 all the time (in the US), vs $39 for the DRM free format. You give up freedom for that $20 but also gain some convenience (frictionless buying process, library management). It is an interesting revealed preference when both are offered which sells at what price.

It would be a no brainer to check a box and get DRM-free vs DRM for the same price. I'd probably pay some premium once I get something (Calibre?) to manage other formats as well as I can manage kindle today, especially since stripping DRM from the latest Amazon format is more challenging than before. But as someone who reads 100+ books/year, it would be hard to justify paying 2x the price for the subset of books I only read once.

> Is this really true? I usually by ebook/pbook combo and I find that I get a better deal directly on the publisher's website. Amazon is a non starter for me because I don't buy into their ebook format. "ebook" to me means epub and pdf.

OK, well, it's not true if you discount the biggest and cheapest competitor out of hand.

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