I bought what?

I love my Kindle and find that I read many more books now than I used to do in dead-tree days.  

I also find that I buy more books.  I do tend to get around to reading them, but I am definitely more impulsive than previously.  Some of this is to with the occasional promotional offers and price reductions.  Some of this is also to do with the ease of purchasing books via the Kindle store. I can over hear a conversation about a book and quickly Google the title; I can click on the link in an article or review or, as I did this morning, I can cast my eye across the train carriage and nosily wonder about the book being read by a fellow traveller and more-or-less immediately start reading it myself.  Of course, and somewhat ironically given the social components now built into the Kindle-reading experience, the passenger across from me needs to be reading a physical book if I'm to have any clue about what he or she is reading at all!  (I'm sure some kind of smart-cover technology will fix this soon enough, although who'll then joyfully admit to enjoying 50 Shades of Beige whilst on public transport?)

Anyway, that's not the point I'm making here.  Well, obviously it is, but only as an aside, if you will.  No, the point I'm making is that I accrue as-yet-unread books in my Kindle library at a rate of knots, sometimes so enthusiastically that I forget I've made the purchase.  So, after finishing a book, when I consult the library on my Kindle I'm often pleasantly surprised to find things in my possession but just as often perplexed when I can't remember what a particular book is about or what prompted me to buy it in the first place.  

Now this is where things are a bit broken.

What I'd like to do very quickly, on my device and within my Kindle library-listing itself, is click through to the book description also used in the main Amazon bookstore, and possibly the reviews.  You know, just to remind me why I was stimulated to make the purchase in the first place.  But of course I can't.  On a traditional Kindle device, all I get is the title and author.  At least on a Kindle Fire, or by using a Kindle app on an iOS or Android device I get to see the cover, which may go some way to jogging my memory, but it's not as good as having quick access to a review, for which I need to fire up a browser and trek across (first-world-problem alert) to the Amazon Kindle store, search for the book, find the description and reignite my memory, before closing the browser and reopening the Kindle or Kindle app and starting to read.

I fairness to Amazon, this did used to be a little easier on iOS devices when access to the store was available from within the app and before Apple implemented one of their famously counter-intuitive waves of control-freakery and banned this little boon to customer experience, but even then the descriptions didn't really accompany the title in the library listing.

Anyway, there we have it... 

In summary:  Can we have a precis of a book's description accompanying it in individual Kindle libraries across apps and devices please?  Thanks.

Is Kindle really a browsing service for real books?

I heard a discussion on Radio 4 this week about the relative merits of ebooks vs physical books.  The upshot of the debate seemed to be that, despite publishers' initial wariness, people were beginning to impulse-buy more books than ever before, due to the always available ebook-stores.  Certainly, people seem to be buying much more than they read and, as there are no bulging shelves to show for it, it's very easy to do.  

However, the radio conversation went on to suggest that people are purchasing ebooks to decide whether they like a book and, if after they have read it they have enjoyed it, they then trek out to the local bookshop and buy a physical copy... in effect, buying the same book twice.  I'm sorry but I just don't believe that.

I like books and I like music... but which is best?

There's only one way to find out...

You might have seen that Spotify has withdrawn the facility for UK users to purchase and download tracks, in favour of concentrating on its primary offering of streaming music.  

My guess is that it was because no-one was bothering to buy and download when they could stream.  Premium subscribers can also save playlists locally to iOS or Android devices as part of their deal.  What's more, those iOS users with an Apple TV can also stream their Spotify tunes through their sound systems at home too... so why buy?

Setting paid-download options alongside streaming options within the Spotify app has never made much sense to me, so it's not really a surprise to see it disappearing

Since picking up a Spotify Premium account when they first became available I've rarely bought anything from iTunes or other download stores.  I listen to hundreds of tracks new and old every month so, for me, Spotify represents great value for money.  Setting paid-download options alongside streaming options within the Spotify app has never made much sense to me, so it's not really a surprise to see it disappearing.

In discussing this on Twitter earlier, I entered a conversation where it was implied that streaming was an effective model for the distribution of audio-books too. With the assumption that the user can store local playlists in the same way as Spotify, I'd agree.  However, for me the subscription model for audio-books is a much more thorny problem.  With Spotify Premium I might listen to hundreds of tracks over a month, plus many albums in part or in full... with the equivalent cost of purchasing individual tracks averaging 99p each and albums between £7.99 and £9.99 Spotify Premium is well worth my £10 per month subscription.

With the streaming of audio-books, however, the subscription value is less clear-cut.  An audio-book might cost £10 or more, but given that they are often hours long, I'm unlikely to get through more than one a month.  What's more, with music and actually reading books competing for my time and attention, there's a good chance it might take me even longer to get through it.  Suddenly a £10 per month subscription doesn't look that attractive.  

I suppose that some of the problem is down to the fact that audio-books have a very specific demographic... including, for example, people with regular lengthy commutes, whereas music fans are more widespread.  You can listen to a track in three minutes and then move onto doing something else, you can treat it like radio and let it roll on in the background all day, or you select a specific album and dedicate an hours attention to it... either way, it fits in more people's busy lifestyles than an audio-book streaming service might.  

If they had a model where for, say £2.99 per month, I could stream a maximum of one or two books per month, that might be more interesting.

Case in point for me is the fact that I undertook Bardowl's 14-day trial last year and started listening to a great book.  However, after a couple of reasonably efficient listening sessions (whilst watching local cricket I seem to remember) I then went to the app to find that my free subscription had expired before I'd reached the end of the book.  Instead, of opting for the subscription, I simply bought the book for my Kindle instead, in the knowledge that I would never realistically listen to enough audio books to warrant the monthly subscription fee.  

I should add, that this is a shame really because I love the concept and I love the Bardowl app, but it comes down to the subscription model not meeting my needs really.  If they had a model where for, say £2.99 per month, I could stream a maximum of one or two books per month, that might be more interesting.

photo: bjmccray