Hi all,
I still have a cold. The pharmacist’s prediction that the latest batch of antibiotics would fix it in 48 hours has proven wrong. I was talking to an ex-neighbour the other day and he told me his wife had had this seasons “cold” for four weeks. Is it just me, or are colds hanging around a lot longer these days? I do have an autoimmune disease, so perhaps it is just me, and my ex-neighbour’s wife. It’s been two and a half weeks of lethargy so far. It’s becoming depressing.
My sister may be in hospital for three weeks, as she waits for the infection to clear up before they operate on her. She has bacterial meningitis. I am hoping to escort my mother down to Melbourne to see my sister sometime this week. My mum does not feel secure in going by herself.
More on Ebooks
I have fallen behind in my newspaper reading (like everything else) so some of this might be old news. But I read that Charlaine Harris has joined Stephenie Meyer, Stig Larson and James Patterson as million ebook sellers. I was curious to see how much they charged and had a look on Amazon. Most of their ebooks were around the $8 mark. With their newer ebooks being around $10.
Another article in The AGE said that The Book Depository in the UK had a special deal with the Royal Mail, which exempted them from paying postage when they sent books to customers overseas. So it is no wonder they offer free postage. When you consider Amazon does not pay state sales taxes in the US and both don’t pay Australia’s GST and then they don’t have the cost of running physical stores, they really have massive cost savings when compared to Australian bookstores.
The same article said ebook sales were currently only 3% of the Aussie market and expected to rise to 30% within a decade. I wonder where they plucked those figures from.
If more companies like Medibank start offering free Kobo ereaders, than maybe the ebook portion of the book market will be far greater than that in a decade. In the US ebooks are predicted to be 50% of the market in five years by a few people including the head of Sony.
I finished reading Cory Doctorow’s polemic YA science fiction novel Little Brother and reviewed it in my last post.
Graham.