The Best of El Reg 2011 now on Kindle Worried about spending the Festive period picking over the remains of finger buffets or over bred, under cooked turkeys? Spend it picking over the last year in tech instead, with The Best of the Reg, 2011, the choicest morsels of our coverage mechanically reconstituted, and twizzled direct to your Kindle device of choice. The …
What device is that then? I got a Kindle last year (for Christmas), haven't bought a single thing from Amazon, I read my email, news articles, the register using my (free) 3G, put my downloaded mobi and pdf books onto it, got to be better than Focus magazine that forces you to have an iPad if you want to read their digital version.
Amazon released an over-the-air update for its Kindle Fire tablet on Wednesday. Meant to fix some of the device's performance issues and add some security measures to prevent shopping sprees by unauthorized hands, we installed the update on our model. While we found some appreciable differences, the Kindle Fire still has performance problems, and the browser still leaves much to be desired....
The title says Kindle. It costs money to buy things from the Kindle store. If not, it would've said PDF and figured if you had a Kindle you could put it on there yourself for free. I think it was clear enough and is fine. I like that Ars Technica and The Register are both experimenting with ways to add to their bottom line this way. Less chance I'll find a 404 message the next time I come over here for a bit of free reading.
The Fail is for you Failing to understand that they were selling this for "actual money" as you say. Maybe they should've taken bitcoins?
The moment I saw "Kindle" in the headline I clicked to read the article operating on the assumption that the book was scarcely going to be part of the Gutenberg project. I think that most would have assumed that it was "pay per view"? I would argue that it is far more of a real world problem where a newspaper or a special interest site promo something without revealing their financial involvement.
AF.
I have nothing against the publishing of this 'book', nor the use of a story to advertise.
I do however a take a little bit of offence at the price. With my limited disposable income already spread thin thanks to having too many relatives requiring presents, and that annoying girlfriend who insists on receiving something at this time of year, I'm not sure I could justify ~£6 for what is arguably a culmination of freely available Internet content (albeit content chosen and presented for me in a useful format).
Perhaps if you were able to keep such items in the magic 'same as coffee' ~£3 range I would be more inclined to purchase (and perhaps if your chosen distribution method was less Amazon and more stop raping me for your part in the sale of my content you could afford to charge less anyway?).
I do worry that this is going to become an ongoing trend - a move towards all of the investigative-style articles becoming paid-for ebooks, and the more lightweight articles being dispensed on the ad-supported website.
I have actually purchased the Jobs and VMWare articles, and whilst I found them enjoyable and informative, there wasn't really anything in them that we didn't get to see on the ad-supported site in the olden days....
I wonder if this is the start of a stealthy paywall-esq model?
I believe in several articles it was mentioned that the Kindle was Amazon's attempt to get someone to buy and carry the cash register (that's a till in Blighty of course but then you have to forget your roots to sell advertising on t'internet) but now you are selling excusively through this platform and forgetting those of us who prefer reading a paperback, or what about making it available via a download area after payment in PDF?
I think it's time to drop the slogan of 'biting the hand that feeds IT' as you stopped doing that some time ago.
"The Best of the Reg 2011 pulls together some of El Reg' best writing on the biggest topics of the year, laced with some of its funniest. It costs £5.74, less than a turkey dinner, AND you'll still want to look at it after Boxing Day."
No, the funniest thing is that it costs £5.74.
Anything at all is more than I'd pay.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
