Posted on by Fuzzy Curmudgeon

If there is anything I hate about the Kindle…

…it’s the Kindle store. Or at least the Science Fiction section of it.
Do they REALLY need to list ALL of the duplicate boutique releases of pirated Gutenberg texts, one after the other?
Right now, out of the first 12 “sorted by Bestselling”, there are 4 versions of “The Time Machine” and 6 versions of “The War of the Worlds”. (Leaving room for only two of one of the Star Wars bubblegum series.)
Second page of 12, 8 versions of “The Invisible Man”. Third page, 10 versions of “The Island of Dr. Moreau”. Page 4, the entire page is “The Island of Dr. Moreau”. And four more copies on Page 5. Followed close on by 3 versions of “Anthem”, that awful Ayn Rand screed.
See where I’m headed?
Can’t there be ONE entry for any given book, and then the various different “releases” listed after the jump?
I realize it makes the number of books available look impressive, but damn, Amazon, this is ridiculous. And it makes searching for books FROM the Kindle a major chore.

6 Replies to “If there is anything I hate about the Kindle…”

  1. You’re absolutely right. Amazon lists about a bazillion versions, especially of their older shit, and it gets totally annoying.
    However, there are other places to look, especially for sci-fi. Check out Baen Books (http://baen.com) where you can either purchase books or they have an entire section of free books as well. All Sci-Fi. Also check out Smashwords and Feedbooks for a bunch of indie authors that write free books as well.
    You know that you aren’t limited to the Amazon Kindle store and .azw files, right? Kindle will read .mobi, .prc and .txt files as well as .pdf (although I don’t recommend transferring .pdf directly to the Kindle as the formatting can sometimes suck).
    You can also download a free program called Calibre to convert non-DRM’ed .epub, .html, .lit and other formats to .mobi for the Kindle to recognize.
    I also have a TON of Sci-Fi (my favorite genre besides horror) ebooks saved on my computer and I’d be glad to share them with you. Shoot me an email if you want, or if you want more information about more book resources/conversions.
    (I’m Big Dick’s wife, BTW and he sent me here since I am a Kindle whore)

  2. I figured it was you 🙂 I don’t know many Kellies. And the ones I know aren’t nearly as erudite as you.
    +1 for Baen. And yeah, I was a heavy Mobipocket user before I bought a Kindle, so I’ve got all kinds of stuff from Gutenberg, etc.

  3. Oh, and the Kindle 2 reads .pdf files natively now, in case you weren’t aware. There was a software update several months ago, seems like it was in November or December but I could be wrong about the timing. It’s the same feature the Kindle DX originally shipped with.
    The only problem I have with that is some of the PDFs I’ve copied onto the Kindle have very small text that is difficult to read on the small Kindle page. But I manage 🙂

  4. (I think I misread your .pdf comment as “pdf converted to mobi” rather than “.pdf read natively”. If so, all I can say is that I haven’t tried any massively-complicated .pdfs so I can’t really say how one with lots of special formatting might turn out…)

  5. I can’t believe Amazon is stupid enough to let situations like this happen. If I were in charge of the Kindle, I’d have someone get the most popular project Gutenberg content, and translate it to Kindle format and make it available for free. That way, they could advertise how much free content is available for the Kindle.

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