Humble eBook Bundle Lets You Pay What You Want For eBooks 103
Following on the success of the various Humble Bundles for DRM-free video games, the organization has just launched its first Humble eBook Bundle. It includes Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow, Pump Six by Paolo Bacigalupi, Zoo City by Lauren Beukes, Invasion by Mercedes Lackey, Stranger Things Happen, and Magic for Beginners, both by Kelly Link. If you choose to pay more than the average (about $11 at this writing), you also get Old Man's War by John Scalzi, and Signal to Noise, by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. The books are available in PDF, MOBI, and ePub formats, without DRM. As with all the Humble Bundles, you can choose how much you'd like to pay, and how the proceeds are split between any of the authors and/or among three charities.
Losing the roots (Score:4, Insightful)
As far as I can tell, these are all popular and published authors and books. Shouldn't a Humble eBook Bundle consist of new and unknown authors, in the same spirit of Humble Indie Bundle?
Except for one of those Humble Indie Bundles that included Psychonauts. Great game? Sure, but hardly Indie.
Re:Books worth more than games (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No dead tree, no deal (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't get people's fascination with these crappy little things that won't even let you leaf through a book
Why would I want to leaf through a book when I can perform an instantaneous search, jump directly to any bookmark or instantly open a book at any page?
or do any of the number of things that make dead trees so much more valuable than digital ink.
Such as?
"But I can carry around hundreds of books in my purse/backpack!" Good for you. Now read all those books at once. You can't? Oh, then what's the point of doing so?
The same point as being able to carry around more music than you can listen to in one sitting. Choice and convenience. If I get an urge to read something, I can pop it right up. If I need to reference something, I can pop that right up too.
Are you homeless and unable to store books anywhere? No?
No, but some of us live in apartments, studios or houses that are not large enough to fit an entire library and some of us have room but want to use that space for better purposes. Also, as stated above, there is the issue of convenience. If I am going on a trip somewhere, I don't have to spend time picking out the books I want to take, I can just grab my reader and have everything available when I want it and if it's not on my reader, I can easily download it.
eBooks have many benefits over paper books aside from what I've already said. You never have to worry about yellowing pages, faded ink or annotations/writing/highlighting on pages. eBooks allow you to change font sizes, font styles and zoom pages. eBooks never disintegrate with age and you can easily keep backups if anything happens to your reader. eBooks can be lent or given to other people, anywhere in the world, at any time without any concern about them damaging or returning your property.
The only "benefit" of paper books is that they are human powered instead of battery powered, which is a dubious advantage when you have battery life measured in weeks or months.