eBooks swelling like dead corpses, offered like buffet.

[Fenris Technique]

Quote

Amazon Offers All-You-Can-Eat Books. Authors Turn Up Noses. Authors are upset with Amazon. Again. For much of the last year, mainstream novelists were furious that Amazon was discouraging the sale of some titles in its confrontation with the publisher Hachette over e-books. Now self-published writers, who owe much of their audience to the retailer’s publishing platform, are unhappy. One problem is too much competition. But a new complaint is about Kindle Unlimited, a new Amazon subscription service that offers access to 700,000 books — both self-published and traditionally published — for $9.99 a month. It may bring in readers, but the writers say they earn less. And in interviews and online forums, they have voiced their complaints. “Six months ago people were quitting their day job, convinced they could make a career out of writing,” said Bob Mayer, an e-book consultant and publisher who has written 50 books. “Now people are having to go back to that job or are scraping to get by. That’s how quickly things have changed.” For romance and mystery novelists who embraced digital technology, loved chatting up their fans and wrote really, really fast, the last few years have been a golden age. Fiction underwent a boom unseen since the postwar era, when seemingly every liberal arts major set his sights on the Great American Novel. Now, though, the world has more stories than it needs or wants to pay for. In 2010, Amazon had 600,000 e-books in its Kindle store. Today it has more than three million. The number of books on Smashwords, which distributes self-published writers, grew 20 percent last year. The number of free books rose by one-third. More at: Log In - The New York Times

Oddly enough when everyone and their brother is churning out abysmal self-pubbed books Amazon responds by following the storage bin auction model of sales.

"Pay a flat fee and whatever junk or treasure is inside this massive container of stuff belongs to you!"

[beetlebox]

I'm not against ebooks as a technology as I think in some cases it offers the opportunity to read works I couldn't otherwise have afforded.

That being said, I found this headline quite uplifting...

Waterstones to stop selling Kindle as book sales surge | Books | The Guardian

[Mr.Plores]

I can only afford e-books. I would gladly pay a bit more though. I live in Norway so many books are only easily accessible through Kindle. I agree too that there is a lot of self published garbage, specially in the military fiction, post apocalyptic genre- Abysmal stuff.

[miguel1984]

I love books as physical objects (for example, S by J.J. Abrams may not be a good novel, but it is a thing of beauty), their smell, the feeling of pages in my fingers, but it is true that with an electronic reading device dust, lack of availability, lack of physical space and affordability are no longer a problem.

[Kevin]

Quote Originally Posted by miguel1984

I love books as physical objects (for example, S by J.J. Abrams may not be a good novel, but it is a thing of beauty), their smell, the feeling of pages in my fingers, but it is true that with an electronic reading device dust, lack of availability, lack of physical space and affordability are no longer a problem.

I couldn't agree more, especially with the first part of your sentence!