Kindle, I have kindle unlimited and read a lot that way.
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That’s why I’ve used Kindle, I have over 1100 bought kindle frmat books. Not all from Amazon but a lot of them.
+1 on Marvin. I wish it would be updated or someone open source it.
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Mostly buying books on Books, working fine for me on iOS 15.5. Kindle app for library books except when they come in some other reader format.
Speaking from the production side, I’ve published 5 books on Amazon Kindle and none on Apple Books. Reasons:
- Apple has too many hoops to go through. Amazon makes it really easy.
- Amazon website and apps are more widely visited than Apple’s.
- With Amazon you can produce printed and ebooks together. Most of my
sales are printed copies. - Better tools for publishing and monitoring sales.
- I must admit, though, that my books look better viewed in the Apple Books app than the Kindle App, but don’t judge a book by it’s cover (or typography!).
As a reader I still prefer Amazon because of wider availability of titles and the Kindle Paperwhite is a great device for portability, visibility in the sun, and battery life.
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This is all really interesting!
I think I’m leaning towards buying stuff on Apple Books mostly, as long as the price isn’t drastically different on Kindle. There’s some collections of comics that have a 10+ dollar difference between Apple and Kindle.
The Kindle app is just yucky - feels like a web wrapper (I think it is) and not being able to buy without going to a web browser is surprisingly inconvenient feeling. I guess Apple got me there.
I am completely uninformed regarding comics and graphic novels. But I read Persepolis and the first volume of Sandman on my iPad in Books and both were lovely. I have also read several ePub cookbooks that way, and it was a positive experience.
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When you publish a book on Amazon can that book be purchased on Apple Books, Kobo, etc.?
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No. Not unless I submit it to Apple. If I remember correctly, the only restriction that Amazon places is that can’t sell the physical book for less than as a Kindle ebook. The physical book can be sold outside of Amazon and in fact I do get some sales through distributors.
I could also sell through Kobo.
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I get a lot of books from different sources but usually get them in epub format and use Books to read them. I get the majority from the public libraries where I have cards and use Libby for reading. Also use the Kindle app for books I get from Amazon, usually their monthly free offering from Prime.
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I use Kindle because it’s not limited to the Apple ecosystem. I’ve an eInk device for reading and Apple don’t have one!
It’s a good app, and extracting highlights can be done in multiple ways.
You also are prohibited from selling the ebook for less anywhere else. There are some restrictions (which are arbitrary, since they are not spelled out specifically) about links inside a book. Amazon will remove a book from sale without an explanation other than that there are issues with the internal links.
I have ebooks going back to the 1990s. I use Calibre to manage them. I prefer ePub for books I buy; I buy either directly from publishers, or from Kobo/Rakutan. Walmart’s ebooks are essentially Kobo ePub books in a Walmart wrapper.
I recently got to hold/use a Kobo Libre eReader; it’s an e-ink reader. I was very favorably impressed.
I just looked this up before posting. Their website does prevent you from setting the price of the printed book less than the ebook. They also reserve the right to lower the price of the ebook to match that you sell an ebook elsewhere. My ebooks (and the basically identical printed versions) all have links for references and to my websites download page which has code for examples in the book. No links to sales sites. Never an issue.
They basically want to prohibit bypassing them for sales, much in the same way Apple does for apps.
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I don’t think I saw this mentioned, but we use mostly Amazon Kindle books for the Whispersync with Audible. If you haven’t used it, the sync between Audible and Kindle books picks right up where ever you left one in the other system.
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Yes, I use it a lot.
One reason is the family sharing. My wife and I share a lot of books, both fiction and non-fiction. If I enjoy a book, I can recommend it to my wife, and she already has it on here iPad. I’ve gotten pretty adept at clicking on a link to Amazon, copying the title of the book, and buying it from Apple. The prices have been the same every time I checked.
Our house is pretty much decorated completely with bookcases. Switching to e-books relieves the stress. If a book is the caliber of a classic, I may buy the paper version. Cheap mysteries, political tell-alls, a lot of what used to be called trade paperbacks, and technical computer-related bools (which will be obsolete in 5 years) all go onto my iPad. Art, photography, and a few books that will stand the test of time somehow get squeezed in to the remaining bookcase space.
In one rather strange case, my wife started re-reading The Glory and the Dream by William Manchester, which we owned. At nearly 1400 pages, she found it a pain to hold up while reading in bed, so we got the ebook to go on our iPads.
In my work, I had to have available tons of documentation, language manuals, contracts, preprints of mathematical papers, etc. Everything that I needed to have available to read went on the iPad, and iBooks was the reader of choice.
When I have a choice, I get the PDF version and for any documents that I generate on my computer I also use PDF. I still keep the Kindle program, but for only one book, which a reference book.
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I made this because I’m an enormous nerd…
…making plans and obsessing over how and where I’ll buy stuff once my iPad comes in Tuesday! It drives me nuts - the main comics I want to read digitally are the Star Wars Legends: Epic Collections and they are not available on Marvel Unlimited and there are tons of volumes missing on Apple Books.
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Try Kobo. When possible, search on ISBN, not author or title.
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Sadly the main comics I’m looking to acquire digitally aren’t there in totality. There must be some funny deal behind the scenes with Amazon or they just happen to have some of these older and out of print books as eBooks.
If you are searching for ISBN, be aware that there is normally a different ISBN for the eBook vs. the printed one.