Shopping for ebooks

I keep my Kindle in Airplane mode, partly because I'm paranoid, partly because I don't shop for ebooks. But I decided I'd give it a try today. Once again, I am appalled by the Kindle. How, seriously, can there be devices in this world where you press a button and then wait noticeable amounts of time for something to happen?! The Kindle is the airport baggage carousel of the tech world. As a device for reading novels, it rocks. That clumsy interface is kinda perfect for representing and reading books. But as a tool for browsing libraries and marketplaces, well, does anyone even? I mean, what do people really use? It can't be the Kindle itself, right?

How do paying customers buy their books these days?

No one does?

I have a Sony Ereader.

Does it help you buy books?

A friend - not me, you understand, a friend - says if a man with no conscience has torrent software, ebook format conversion software, and a usb cable, he might never buy a book ever. And if he did, would he really use the shitty interface that ebook readers provide? So where else would a fellow buy an ebook?

actually, a whole lotta places sell them now.

Amazon of course is the first to come to mind. Pretty much every book they have is available in ebook format.
Also, a lot of independent publishers run their own stores without crappy DRM

So the answer is that people are buying them.

I run a bookswap in Beijing and over the last 7 years, we've noticed a decrease in attendance. Main Reason: Kindles. people are resorting to ebooks because of convenience.  My dad ran a publishing house and it sickens me that one day, we might not be able to get things on paper.

I buy lots of ebooks for my Kindle. However, I rarely buy non-fiction for it. I still rely on good old books with pages for that. The Kindle is, to me, absolute crap when it comes to books with footnotes and illustrations.

So am I right in guessing the actual shopping happens on your pc? Raises interesting questions about book discovery - where people find out about books and how they go about selecting something for purchase. I mostly learn about books through news feeds, and that most often happens on my phone. I have no idea if book purchases are still tied to whatever device did the buying. One would hope not.

I personally don't get the allure of paper for a novel. For a textbook, I do prefer a paper version. Highlighting and annotating on a tablet isn't exactly pointless, but it's close. But book smell and paper texture.... I don't find that being part of the novel reading experience. Clearly some do, though. No idea how big an impact that has on ebook sales.

How many of you book touchers find yourself wishing for "the real thing" when reading ebooks?

most of the actual buying happens on tablets and other mobile devices... that's the convenience factor.

 I do go booksploring on Amazon but it is deffo not the same as a good bookstore. Recently went to the one good one in HZ. Came out of there with 600 RMB worth of novels and only one was by an author I had read before. My rule is that if the title entices me, I buy it. Kind of the same on Amazon. I do not read the blurb.

So this in the news:

Is This the “Golden Age” for Chinese Web Authors?

Chinese “web literature” sites are making some amateur web authors wealthy by offering tools that enable fans to reward their favorite writers.

At ChinaDaily USA, Xu Jing examined the explosive growth of Chinese internet literature, noting that some writers are currently earning more than 10 million yuan ($1.6 million) per year...


Do English language writers have anything like this as far as anyone knows?

i just 'buy' the free ones on google bookstore!