Whitcoulls vs. the eBooks

[asgard]

So maybe I should have already posted about my latest joy.

My new Kindle 3.

Love love love. I’ll post about it in the future, just felt that I had to say this now.

Whitcoulls & Borders in New Zealand are very likely going to be closing down. Why? Various reasons. The question I have is how much of that has to do with the competition they face from

Comments

[sakurazuka_jae]

Someone also pointed out in an article today that Whitcoulls was not keeping up pricewise with online retailers, and that books in general in NZ are vastly overpriced. Bookdepository and even Amazon have a wider variety and often price out well in competition (Bookdepository certainly does).

Regarding ebooks, you have made many good points. I still prefer books, for one major reason - which is that with a book I can simply flip to the page I want. With an ereader (I have a Kobo, I don't know how it compares with the others) I have to page through every single damn page to get to the section I want to read. It is actually more efficient for me to read ebooks using my computer and Adobe Digital Editions. I kind of liken it to when DVDs first came out and you could only scene skip but not fast forward or reverse. I said at the time that if they couldn't fast forward like a video they couldn't compete. Well, they fixed that problem and won the day, now I want ebooks to step up.

I gather this is not as big a problem with bought ebooks, but with with most of my files being freely available and downloaded pdfs I find it aggravating.

Another con is that ereaders are currently very expensive and I would not be comfortable taking mine out of the house (and a kobo is at the cheaper end of the scale), whereas I don't worry so much about a book, which is much easier (and cheaper!) to replace.