Joan bought me a Sony Touch for Christmas. This is an ideological choice–basically, I believe we need competition in this market. I plan to pass along some notes about the Reader in the future (Joan’s got a Kindle, so I can do comparisons), but today let’s discuss the Sony eBook Store.
Down the page you’ll find a list of the books which were on my Amazon Wish List when I started this little project. A short summary of the information:
- 64 books.
- 62 are currently available as new paper books on Amazon (one of the other two is out of print; the other’s not yet published.)
- 19 of those books are available for purchase in the Kindle store.
- All but one of the 19 are cheaper than the paper version (the exception has the same price for both media).
- 12 of those books are available for purchase in the Sony store.
- Two are cheaper than the paper version. (In both cases, they match the Kindle price.)
- Two were available for free from Google Books, so the Wish List has since changed.
Both eBook stores have serious deficiencies. The selection is just plain unsatisfactory if you’re serious about books. But Sony seems not to understand basic pricing strategies. It’s a good thing I didn’t expect to make much use of their store. I’ll mostly be finding my reading material elsewhere, something I knew before I asked for the Reader.
As long as I’m discussing Wish Lists: Sony’s store lets me create one, but doesn’t seem to have a method for sharing it. Again, I think they’ve completely missed the point.
Here’s the list (sorted newest to oldest–Bicycling Science has been on the list for over four years). Feel free to reach your own conclusions.
| Title | Author |
Amazon |
Kindle |
Sony |
note |
|
What Distant Deeps |
David Drake |
not yet published |
|||
|
The Miracle has Landed |
Matthew Silverman |
$16.47 |
|||
|
Asylum for the Insane |
William Decker |
$31.50 |
|||
|
Beating Around the Bushes |
Tim Sommer |
$15.95 |
|||
|
Report from Engine Co. 82 |
Dennis Smith |
$10.08 |
$9.99 |
||
|
The Past has Another Pattern |
George Ball |
$24.75 |
|||
|
A Soldier Reports |
William Westmoreland |
Amazon has it used |
|||
|
America’s Longest War |
George Herring |
$31.72 |
|||
|
History of the Express Companies |
A.L. Stimson |
$33.40 |
free from Google Books |
||
|
LeMay |
Warren Kozak |
$18.45 |
$14.76 |
$19.56 |
|
|
The Cherryh Odyssey |
Edward Carmien |
$19.95 |
|||
|
His Majesty’s Ship |
Alaric Bond |
$17.05 |
|||
|
Inventing Wyatt Earp |
Allen Barra |
$14.96 |
|||
|
A Handbook of Statistical Analysis Using R |
Brian Everitt |
$37.08 |
Sony has his Stata book |
||
|
Three Men in a Boat |
John Jerome |
$5.95 |
$0.99 |
$0.99 |
free from Google Books |
|
Society for American Baseball Research |
Turner Publishing/SABR |
$38.65 |
|||
|
Names on the Land |
George Stewart |
$13.57 |
|||
|
Lost for Words |
Lynda Mugglesworth |
$24.00 |
|||
|
The Jacksonian Economy |
Peter Temin |
$18.13 |
|||
|
Andrew Jackson and the Bank War |
Robert Remini |
$13.44 |
|||
|
The Rise of American Democracy |
Sean Wilentz |
$13.57 |
|||
|
Chants Democratic |
Sean Wilentz |
$24.95 |
|||
|
Andrew Jackson |
Sean Wilentz |
$14.96 |
$11.97 |
$15.40 |
|
|
What Hath God Wrought |
Daniel Walker Howe |
$23.10 |
$10.86 |
$18.38 |
|
|
Shop Class as Soulcraft |
Matthew Crawford |
$17.13 |
$9.99 |
$9.99 |
|
|
Slayer Slang |
Michael Adams |
$17.09 |
|||
|
The Plot Against Pepys |
James Long |
$20.40 |
|||
|
Metropolitan Government and Governance |
G Ross Stephens |
$42.00 |
|||
|
The View from the Masthead |
Hester Blum |
$43.16 |
|||
|
As They See ‘Em |
Bruce Weber |
$17.16 |
$13.73 |
||
|
Conspirator |
CJ Cherryh |
$17.13 |
|||
|
Elsewhere, USA |
Dalton Conley |
$16.32 |
$13.06 |
||
|
The Fielding Bible |
John Dewan |
$16.29 |
|||
|
Bill James Gold Mine 2009 |
Bill James |
$16.29 |
|||
|
Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball |
Dock Ellis |
$20.65 |
|||
|
High and Inside |
Lou Gorman |
$29.95 |
|||
|
John Evelyn |
Gillian Darley |
$42.00 |
|||
|
The Mythical Man-Month |
Frederick Brooks |
$25.80 |
$19.24 |
||
|
Authority and Disorder in Victorian Times |
Paul Thomas |
$15.99 |
|||
|
The Almanac of American Politics 2008 |
Michael Barone |
$47.22 |
nor do they have the other editions |
||
|
Citizens of the World |
David Hancock |
$37.57 |
|||
|
The Shaping of America vol 3 |
DW Meinig |
$32.50 |
|||
|
Home Before Morning |
Linda Van Devanter |
$17.96 |
|||
|
A History of Money and Banking in the United States |
Murray Rothbard |
$19.00 |
|||
|
Capital Ideas Evolving |
Peter Bernstein |
$19.77 |
$9.22 |
$20.96 |
|
|
Dealers of Lightning |
Michael Hiltzik |
$13.25 |
$9.99 |
$12.59 |
|
|
Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me |
Richard Farina |
$10.88 |
|||
|
Behind-the-Scenes Baseball |
Doug Decatur |
$11.66 |
|||
|
Managing Humans |
Michael Lopp |
$16.49 |
|||
|
The Blighted Cliffs |
Edwin Thomas |
$17.99 |
|||
|
Sails on the Horizon |
Jay Worrell |
$11.16 |
$9.99 |
$12.56 |
|
|
Revolution in the Head |
Ian MacDonald |
$11.53 |
|||
|
Beautiful Code |
Greg Wilson |
$38.56 |
$28.79 |
||
|
The Making of Victorian Values |
Ben Wilson |
$17.81 |
$9.99 |
$19.56 |
|
|
Terwilliger Bunts One |
Wayne Terwilliger |
$16.95 |
|||
|
Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage |
$11.53 |
||||
|
The Rider |
Tim Krabbe |
$9.35 |
$9.35 |
$11.65 |
|
|
The Yellow Jersey |
Ralph Hurne |
$11.66 |
|||
|
Not a Suicide Pact |
Richard Posner |
$25.60 |
$14.27 |
||
|
The Places in Between |
Rory Stewart |
$10.76 |
$8.80 |
$9.45 |
|
|
Thinking for a Living |
Thomas Davenport |
$11.98 |
$9.58 |
||
|
Management by Baseball |
Jeff Angus |
$22.95 |
$9.99 |
$12.59 |
|
|
Rothstein |
David Pietrusza |
$10.88 |
|||
|
Bicycling Science |
David Gordon Wilson |
$17.79 |
The table from Open Office Calc–which generates HTML that’s as ugly as Excel’s. I ran it through Tidy to clean things up a bit.