Books, eBooks, and Amazon

So I've been reading a lot of books on my Kindle... Getting the Kindle has helped me to reverse the trend of me browsing for books - both in the library and online, then borrowing/downloading the books, and then not reading them. Still, that only applies to the digital books...

I can't help snatching books off the book shelf in the library... But when I get home... There's so many other things vying for my time that I pretty much never get to the books. Plus these days, I'm getting lazy to bring books out to read... Either I read stuff on the phone or I'd take my Kindle...

Which brings me to the main point of this post. The procurement of eBooks.

I love the email system of the Kindle - you can set an email for your Kindle, and just mail the books to your Kindle. I personally use Calibre to organise my eBooks and mail them to my Kindle. It also can convert PDFs and ePUBs to the Kindle Mobi format. Doesn't work for all PDFs though, sometimes the resulting format is just unreadable.

But regarding the procurement...

Now that's just troublesome. It's even more troublesome for me to buy eBooks than to download illegal copies. Why? Because of location restrictions. Amazon doesn't sell eBooks in Singapore. Neither does Apple. You need complicated things like VPN to buy Kindle books from Amazon. Apple? It's even worst. You need a US payment method - credit card or debit card - before they let you download anything from the US app store. Used to be that I could download free apps without a payment method... I just tried the other day. Nope, they won't let me do that anymore. *sigh*

Amazon puts ads on your Kindle - you can pay extra to disable the ads, but I've come to like those ads. It's usually some advertisement for a book, and the ad only appears when you 'turn off' the Kindle - it's an eink display so keeping the screen on practically uses no battery - so the ads are really no intrusive. I've actually found quite a few of the books advertised interesting. And I would have purchased them if I could. You know, like without having to do all the VPN, gift card crap. If I had to go to such lengths to buy a book... I could spend a similar amount of time to get the book through some other methods... (And really, the alternative is really fast if you know where to look.)

I remember a Chinese essay regarding music piracy I had to write over a decade ago. Back when the concept of piracy was in it's infancy and I was still using things like Kazaa to get my songs. The problem then was that there was a lack of legal means to get digital music, and that many teens, myself included, has no access to a credit/debit card to buy our songs online. So what do we do then? You can't stop us from listening to songs. We just pirate. The credit/debit card problem is still there for many teens, especially in an Asian country like Singapore where parents can be pretty strict. But the next barrier is that of geographical location. After years of negotiation, Netflix has finally landed in Singapore, Malaysia, and a bunch of other countries in the region. Some dramas/movies are not available here due to copyright laws or other legal restrictions, but being able to get on Netflix without VPNs and other web trickery is definitely an improvement.

Sure there are loads of legal hoops that cooperations need to jump through, but as consumers, we don't care. Well, those who do care a little more would go through the trouble of tricking Amazon to think that we are in the US. But the rest of us would just do it some other way. And that other way does not involve publishers/authors getting a single dime.

It's simple. Give us an easy way and we'll be a lot, A LOT more inclined to do things legally. If I can get the book in two clicks, without even leaving my Kindle, why would I take the time to search for the book online, download said book, load it into Calibre, convert it into Mobi if it's in the wrong format, then email it to my Kindle?

Till the day it's easy for me to buy Kindle books on Amazon!