We are now so wedded to buying our books from the Kindle Store that it comes as something of a shock to find that respected publishing blogger, Joe Wikert, is breaking the Amazon habit. He is fed up with several aspects of Amazon’s marketing policies and last week’s spat with IPG, where 5,000 titles were removed from the library, is just the latest disappointment for him.
While acknowledging that it is less than ideal to be buying books from different vendors and having to maintain libraries in a number of apps, rather than simply in the one Kindle app, he is feeling pretty liberated now he’s made the decision.
If you have bought a Kindle you are pretty much locked in to Amazon and, as Wikert believes, this is not necessarily a good thing. Buying a tablet is liberating because you can pick and choose which libraries to support. Is this going to become a trend? If so, it bodes well for Apple’s home-grown iBooks. It should also make Amazon pause for thought.
Well actually if you have a Kindle, you can buy ebooks in the Kindle format from no end of sources on line, but not directly with the Kindle, but via your computer. Simply surf to the online ebook shop on your computer, find, buy and download the ebook, then simply connect your Kindle to your computer, and copy and paste the ebook to your Kindle… Voila!