When I bought my Kindle last year as a birthday present for myself I figured it would encourage me to start reading more as the majority of the books I now buy are from the Folio Society. Now, while Folio Society books are beautifully presented they are not commuter friendly given they are usually heavy and quite frankly, too nice to be abused by London Transport.
The problem I have found with the Kindle offerings however is the cost; very often Amazon sell the Kindle version for more than the paperback version with the difference being anything from a few pence to a few pounds and as a result I’m finding myself buying more paperbacks than I did before; not quite how I had envisaged things working out!
One of the books I’m currently reading is John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I vaguely recall as a child the TV show with Alec Guinness but needless to say as a 8 year old it all seemed a bit dull as I don’t recall any action and so it was banished from my mind until a few weeks ago when I read an article on Mr Le Carré and before I knew it I had bought Tinker, Tailor… for the Kindle and it’s not bad, tho I find myself having to re-read bits as my concentration is shoddy, that and I’m reading 2 other books so my brain is merging all three together and getting royally confused.
I thought I would make it a bit easier on myself by getting the audio version of the book from Audible, the theory being I could read it on my Kindle while I listened to it. Sadly the Kindle can do one or the other, when I have it on the Audible version I can’t read it…colour me pissed off by technology that doesn’t really make life easier! Despite these annoyances, I still like my Kindle.
I’m also reading Jeffrey Deaver’s second book in the Lincoln Rhyme series. I gather the first book, The Bone Collector, was made into a film starring Angelina Jolie, this I find sad because my vision of the character she plays does not look anything like Ms Jolie, who if I’m honest I don’t really find all that attractive, sure she’s not ugly but she doesn’t really do much for me, I’m sure she’d say the same if asked about me. So far the books have been very enjoyable reads but when buying them it did highlight another ‘quirk’ with Amazon’s pricing.
As before, I looked for the Kindle version and found that each book was at least £1 more expensive than the paperback edition and as I wasn’t sure if I was going to re-read them I decided to opt for buying from the used section and getting rid of them via Book Crossing. As I have the Amazon Prime membership I sorted the list by those that are shipped directly from Amazon and was quite amazed at how cheap things worked out. In total the first 5 books cost me £8.38 and the quality of the books are very good, some could very well pass as brand new. It did make me wonder what profit is there for the book seller tho as they have to send their stock to Amazon and presumably hand over a percentage of the sale but when the sale is £1.73, what profit is left?
