The Magic of Differential Pricing

It's really odd to watch the Amazon store at work for Kindle books, even free ones. As I'd previously noted, there basically aren't any free Kindle books. Except, there are, but just not for me.

An odd quirk of the Amazon storefront is that the first time I load it up on a machine after a couple of days, I get to see Kindle books based on what I last viewed or in various other sections of the page, all with alluring prices - and in one notable case, it did this for an item I remembered the price of - USD$6.95 (now USD$5.95 when I checked it again for this article) for the otherwise freely downloadable Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Except, this time it was showing me the price as USD$3.95 ... so I clicked on the item, and hey presto! the price suddenly jumps by USD$2.00 - and if I refresh the Amazon landing page, suddenly the prices of half the Kindle books (most notably the "free" ones) change to reflect this.

It's very repeatable, and very frustrating, since it seems to only happen for Kindle books and not for anything else I've ever looked at on the Amazon store; Kindle books are "special" in several ways to the Amazon storefront, partly because of the bizarre regional availability (so the store tries very hard to pretend books I can't buy don't exist), but also because they seem to be the only thing to which Amazon are applying regionally differentiated pricing.

Basically, there seems to be a bug in the storefront which isn't picking up on my geographical location at first visit, so I'm given a tantalizing glimpse of the pricing US customers see, just as I sometimes get a glimpse of Kindle editions I can't buy. However, then it adds the "regional surcharge" to the browser session if I click on an item and thereafter the storefront only shows me the regionally adjusted prices.

The really interesting thing is that when this happens I can use "open in a new tab" to check all kinds of things, and it appears thus far that this hidden regional surcharge doesn't exist for full-priced Kindle e-texts. Presumably, for e-texts over a certain publisher price Amazon are happy just getting their cut; it's only for ones that fall under some mysterious threshold price to which a crude surcharge is applied.

Ultimately, I could live with a small regional surcharge, because I'm aware of what Amazon have sunk into their incredible infrastructure where small regional price differentials do exist. But what really bites is the scale of the discrepancy; it's 4 cents per Gigabyte difference in S3 pricing for AsiaPac, but being charged two dollars for a megabyte is just wrong, given that even the dastardly local telcos don't charge that for 3G data (and even the NZ$1/Mb rate is just to soak the unwary, it's easy to avoid).

So, I've almost finished Accelerando and the Kindle has really proven itself (barring some odd formatting in the book, which may be an artifact of the preparation - 10²³ was rendered without superscripts as 1023, the kind of thing that makes a difference in a book using Big Numbers). It's really a great device, and the notion that in 5-10 years something like it could be almost ubiquitous is pretty exciting, although I imagine the textbook publishers will have a much harder time adapting their business models to e-text than mass-market fiction/non-fiction publishers are managing now (where although it's a bumpy ride, it's at least slightly less disruptive).

Romance of the Three Kingdoms on Kindle

I have first here to confess that I learned of the Three Kingdoms through playing one of the earliest editions of the computer game version by Koei, specifically Romance of the Three Kingdoms on the Amiga (I also greatly enjoyed Nobunaga's Ambition, published around the same time).

Ever since then, reading a translation of the original book has been on my to-do list, and lo and behold there's a free Edition available. From a quick look it doesn't have any of the extra material or historical notes of the acclaimed Moss Roberts Translation, so there's real value in still going for one of those, but given the massive size of the book I suspect I'm much more likely to succeed in reading it as an E-text. Note that from Silk Pagoda you also get an HTML version.

Note that the Silk Pagoda edition linked above is also on the Amazon store as The Romance of Three Kingdoms, where you might note a small price differential. This can really only be ascribed to the way Amazon's burying of the 3G data charges - note that most "free" e-texts on Amazon are about USD$2, but ROTK is a monster book of about 2Mb in a compressed .PRC MobiPocket form - and WiFi Kindle owners can't escape that cunningly hidden 3G surcharge even though we get none of the benefit.

Probably the main thing I expect to lose out on with this is syncing, since I have a feeling it would be nice to have the option of reading this on PC from time to time. However, the Kindle for PC reader application only works with texts you've purchased and paid for via Amazon (which is disappointing but hardly surprising - as with the 3G data surcharges, it makes rather less sense for WiFi-only Kindles but everything in Kindle world is still oriented around 3G-only devices). I'm also experimenting with MobiPocket (which has RSS feed conversion and other interesting capabilities - it has PDF conversion but unfortunately doesn't handle the PDFs I have which are from old TeX-formatted->PS->PDF scientific papers) and thus far that seems to work just fine including syncing the read points with the Kindle.

By the way, ROTK isn't the only one of those classics I'm hoping to take a stab at: thanks to the excellent Dan Simmons books Ilium and Olympos I've got a hankering to at least take a crack at The Iliad and Odyssey. Eventually, anyway - I do feel a bit of an ignoramus for having never tried before.

Kindle 3 Second Impressions

After having a little more time to settle in with the device, I'm getting more comfortable with what it can and can't do, at least with the current firmware. But more importantly I've started actually reading on it, and that's an experience I can't fault.

But first, a warning: after discovering Feedbooks and in particular the essential Kindle Download Guide, which is a MobiPocket-format e-book with hyperlinks to all the other Mobipocket free content they have, things became... strange.

After downloading a couple of texts (because there's some great old stuff there including many beloved childhood classics: Edgar Rice Burroughs! H.P. Lovecraft! E.E. "Doc" Smith!), suddenly the Kindle froze and rebooted... and then a couple more and it rebooted again... and if I attempted to add a book to a collection, instant repeatable reboot. Try and read any of what I downloaded, instant reboot.

The only way to resolve this was to remove the Download Guide e-book completely. I can't say why, but that thing is evidently anathema to the Kindle 3.0 firmware - even though reading the guide itself was fine, simple having it on the device rendered the device unstable. Remove that, however, and suddenly all was well.

And so I began to settle in, beginning with Accelerando, which I've mostly been reading in bed at night or in the early morning. And here the Kindle ... well, it Just Works(tm). The display is clear and easy to read in just about any lighting conditions, enough so that I wouldn't bother springing for a case with light. I do, however, seriously regret not getting a plain leather case when I ordered the Kindle, because the shipping on the case alone is quite expensive (Amazon by not actually calling the new Kindle something distinctive haven't made it easy to know what case fits what device, so I have no idea whether anything I can order in New Zealand would suit it or not).

The next-page/back buttons on the side of the device work well so I've never had a problem getting comfortable and holding the Kindle with either hand. It hasn't yet quite "disappeared" for me yet, to the point where I've forgotten that it's there, but when reading it I'm definitely able to get into the flow of reading just as well as if it was a print book.

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Now, things that don't work so well: well, the Webkit-based browser built into it is a mixed bag. The most baffling thing of all about it is that you get no control at all over font size in pages, even though regular desktop browsers all provide this and so does the Kindle itself for e-texts. This means that you're always forced into using one of the zoomed-in views to read the teeny-tiny text which is clunky and just... ugh, especially for pages with navigation sidebars.

However, pages designed for mobile phones are mostly a joy on the Kindle. Plain Gmail has the teeny-tiny-font problems and runs very slowly (and has crashed the browser outright at least once). Mobile Gmail is just perfect, though; it was good on a Symbian S60 phone and it's equally good on the Kindle. The stand-out exception where neither works well is Google Reader, since the mobile version isn't good even on phones where it uses numeric keys for its limited interactions, which means that the Kindle's alpha-oriented keyboard makes for an even worse experience. Not that I'd want Google Reader except that a quality RSS reading experience is something that the Kindle is crying out for and is unavailable outside North America.

Apropos of which, the regional availability is just driving me nuts, and there doesn't seem to be any way around it. Although the Steam Game Service has a lot of the same region problems (including Australia/NZ being charged over 3 times the USD price for some games), at least there gifting is an option, or would be if I knew anyone in the U.S. willing to help. There's no gifting for the Kindle, however, even for items where the print version can be gifted.

So, while I'd like to get Illuminatus! again (and I could briefly find it on my Kindle before it fully region-locked itself, which is why it's on my Amazon Wish List), I can't. I'd like to (re)read some other books like some Thomas Pynchon and Infinite Jest but even though for some of those I know Kindle editions exist, Amazon won't even show me the items existing at all in e-book format unless I find the URLs for them externally via Google.

So, most of the content I actually want for the device I simply can't buy. Fortunately there are other sources of e-books I can use, and I can see that the Kindle definitely will still increase my reading volume. If only it wasn't for the bizarre region-locking it would be an unhesitating recommendation, but as it is I'm not unhappy and definitely looking forward to a Wi-Fi DX joining the line-up. It also won't be supplanting my print subscription to The Economist as the Kindle version is remarkably expensive and doesn't give access to the Web version, something that comes with a print subscription; and although I'd found that out already while looking for content after ordering the Kindle, now that I actually have the device it's vanished off Amazon's web site for me now - it's evidently region-locked, and thus hidden by the "doesn't exist" filter. /sigh

Update: Oh yeah, one small thing I didn't pick up on before buying the Kindle is that it uses a Micro-USB B connector, like the slimline Nokia phones (e.g. the E71) do. Which is fine and dandy, no problem, except that generic Micro-USB B cables are stupidly hard to get hold of at the moment, at least in New Zealand - no-one carries them retail (except as an overpriced Nokia accessory) and there's only one vendor on TradeMe selling cables. That problem will hopefully go away over time but right now I have no spares.

Kindle 3 First Impressions

This morning before we drove down to the final meeting where our HR guy presented us the final legal papers related to the layoff, I got to pick up the package containing a shiny new Kindle as delivered to the town's local store (since I live rurally, the town store - Jaques 4 Square - or the town Post Office are where packages go). Overall, this kind of logistics - that I can have a physical object reach me so quickly from the other side of the world - still impresses me more than global networking, if only because I saw global networking evolve and even from the UUCP days there was an inevitability to it.

So, out of the box. Pull the indicated tab on the box, open box, and there's the device with a nice little pamphlet and what looks to be a piece of paper with instructions (1. Plug into USB port...) sitting underneath a plastic screen protection sticker. Except on plugging in the USB cable, those instructions go away because it's not paper, it's the E-ink which is the Kindle's lifeblood.

So while my partner drove, I read the manual included on the device, on the device. And having never seen a Kindle or E-ink before in the flesh, I was suitably impressed. Page turning wasn't crisp, but it was "just right". It felt like about 150ms for the repaint, in two passes (the display kinda inverts when showing a new page), but the time itself doesn't matter compared to the subjective feeling. It's remarkably consistent, and rarely feels wrong in the way that many mobile devices (for instance, Symbian S60 phones like the Nokia E71 which is otherwise awesome) often do.

And the more I read the manual, the happier I got... so many capabilities, and the more I read the manual and got used to the feel of the device the more I started to think I shouldn't have played it cautious and got the WiFi-only one.

Alas, for all that Amazon have nailed the out-of-box experience and then some - it even comes pre-connected to your Amazon account, so that the instant you let it touch a network you're ready to go - and the price is right and the display is awesome, there's almost immediate fail that takes some of the joy out, at least for a non-US customer.

Take a simple thing like blog reading. Discussed in the manual, doesn't exist. No there, no hint of it. When I eventually get to a regular PC with a browser and check it out - browsing Amazon changed completely as soon as I got the ship announcement e-mail, as then there was a Kindle in my account and what I saw adapted to fit that, which shows how someone at Amazon had worked to make this a great experience - is the fail: "Not available in Asia/Pacific".

Seriously, WTF? Via 3G, I can understand some of this; the language in the manual is fine about the limitations of 3G outside the US, and how for instance some content won't be delivered until you hit a Wi-Fi hotspot or will cost you. Given the way telcos work, which is nothing short of extortionate, I've been nothing short of amazed that even Amazon have been able to get as far as they have in terms of data service for a device like this, and I appreciate that services have to fit their business model to make the 3G capabilities work. But simple RSS feed reading doesn't exist on my device because I'm not in the U. S. of A, even though mine  is Wi-Fi only? Huh?

Looking at buying magazines is similar: my first pick is India Today which looks like good reading and great value, but what's this: no images. OK, maybe there's a territorial copyright thing specifically with that, but in fact the Kindle store on the device (and only on the device, not on the PC) tells me that images in any magazine will simply be unavailable outside the US. Whether that's a 3G-data-charge-business limitation or a territorial-copyright limitation is not clear, it's just a simple "no" and the price is the same.

So, hit the kindle store, look for e-books... but wait, no free content at all? E-books I know are just Gutenburg text files are paid purchases "delivered for free via Whispernet"? No, Amazon, paying you for this is not "free", when what you're charging is mighty close to what some of these things cost in paper editions via Penguin Classics.

Here too, I understand that Amazon's business model has limits; the toll road of payment systems is ... well, it constantly amazes me that Valve and game developers can make any money from selling things for the prices they do, given that what Visa and Mastercard will charge most people for payment processing is so close to ursury.

So, a few disappointments. But then...

The fact remains that the device itself is awesome, and that Amazon's engineers have mostly done the right things to make the whole thing full of win, and if I was resident in the U.S. I wouldn't have had to deal with the light coating of bitterness and failure I need to dig through to enjoy my purchase. As I browse the Kindle Store, temptation is ... well, everywhere, because even though relatively few books are available yet in Kindle editions (at least to me, thanks to territorial rights) there's still so much that I want to read there... so, sooooooo much...

And moving outside Amazon's "no free lunch" built-in store gives us sites like http://www.feedbooks.com/ where there may not be gold, but there are gems like Rudy Rucker's Ware series; I read Software and Wetware and  lots of Rudy Rucker, Sr's other work (Spacetime Donuts and Master of Space and Time and Saucer Wisdom) in paperback.

And, well, the more I look the better things get. The potential of this device really is astounding, and everywhere I look I can see why the U.S. customers love it; if only we second-class citizens of the world could actually experience the full thing.

In the meantime, The Steep Approach to Garbadale awaits, in library book form, and I'd better finish that before starting on what the Kindle can deliver me. I can already feel the urge to read The Illuminatus! Trilogy again (probably for about the 4th time, but it's such a classic), or maybe China Mieville's new book Kraken, or... damn you, Amazon, don't you know I'm unemployed now?