Karin van den Berg .nl

Update: I started a new blog on the subject of the Kindle.

When the Kindle first came my interest was caught but it was a bit too expensive for my taste. I wasn't really convinced I would enjoy reading from a Kindle as much as from a real book.

Now the Kindle 3 has a lot more accessible price point I started to reconsider. I also have an Android phone on which I could read Kindle books but firstly because of battery life, secondly because of display technology and thirdly screen size, it seemed a lot more appealing to read in a Kindle.

So I seriously considered ordering one. But then I looked into book pricing and was pretty much shocked.

Not counting the $189 I would have to spend on the device (yes I would go for the more expensive 3G model), here's a few comparisons.

One thing I was planning on is buying the Stieg Larsson Millenium Trilogy, which I haven't read at all. Normally I would go to amazon.co.uk and buy the paperbacks:

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium Trilogy Book 1) - £3.29
The Girl Who Played with Fire (Millennium Trilogy Book 2) - £3.29
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest (Millennium Trilogy Book 3) - £3.49

Total £10.07, when I actually order these for delivery to the Netherlands the total is £10.68 due to VAT differences. This is not counting shipping but as Amazon.co.uk ships any order over £25 for free to the Netherlands these days I would simply add some items from my wishlist to make sure I qualify for free shipping. So the total for me in € would be about €12.45

Now, the Kindle books in the Kindle UK store are a little cheaper (incidentally I can only see this on my phone, for some reason on my PC amazon seems to know I'm not from the UK and doesn't show the prices), the Kindle books are £2.68 each, assuming the same differences in VAT that would be a total of £8.52, or about €9.93

But as a non-UK customer you have to buy your ebooks from amazon.com's Kindle store. Not really a problem, you might think, that is, if you are actually in the US. The prices there are a little higher but not shockingly so: $5, $5 and $10 for the trilogy, making $20 total which is about €14.95. A 50% increase, actually quite a bit steeper. But here's the real kicker, which makes me as a European customer feel cheated. These are the actual prices when I go to the Kindle store in my phone's Kindle app: $8.28, $12.03, $12.03, a total of $32.34, or €24.18, 144% more then the UK Kindle books, and nearly twice as much as the paperbacks from amazon.co.uk, and also more expensive than the US paperbacks, as is clearly shown when I visit the ebook's page in amazon's own table

The difference between US and non-US can't even be explained by VAT percentages as the latest two books cost $5 and $10 for US customers but both are $12.03 outside of the US.

These differences may not be that big for every book, and sometimes it seems european customers pay less then US customers for the same kindle book, but I think overall you'll find your worse off in Europe. I found this post including a table of the prices for the NYT bestsellers list. You can see a couple of cases where international customers pay less, but when you add up all the prices where they're available, you get $228.82 for US and $281.93 for international customers. That's 23% more on average, with 5 out of 21 books cheaper, the other 16 more expensive.

I'm sure that Amazon is not (completely) at blame here, this has to do with what publishers want. The average book price in the Netherlands in general is significantly higher then in the UK or the US, mostly due to the fact that we still have fixed book pricing for dutch titles. This doesn't apply to imported english literature but does affect those prices as well. But I can legally and quickly order anything from amazon.co.uk at very UK-ish prices, making things a lot cheaper, and then I don't want to pay more yet again when I want to read on a Kindle, just because I happen to be on this side of the water.

So I guess now that I've waited for the price of the device itself to go down, I now need to wait until book prices equalize internationally before it really is interesting for me to switch to e-books. Anyone have any idea how long my wait will be?

There's a few folders I copy/backup by default before reinstalling a system or installing a new system to get things back the way I want it - Firefox and Thunderbird profiles, Miranda IM database and now Picasa's database.

I couldn't find this easily using Google so I hope to help out with this simple task.

Before (re)install on old system:
1. Copy/backup the c:/documents and settings//local settings/application data/Picasa2 folder

After (re)install on new system:

2. Install Picasa (yes it's Picasa 3 atm but it still creates a Picasa 2 folder)

One of many of IE's irritations, is the whitespace it produces when using

Thankfully, solving this is simple. Just add:

form {
margin: 0;
}

to your stylesheet or between

Took me a bit of time to figure this one out.

There's a couple of empty functions in the PEAR File_PDF class (based on FPDF), header and footer, that you can implemented with inheritance to define a header and footer for your PDF pages. Very useful of course. However I ran into the following problem: I tried extending the class as suggested in the function's comments, for example:

class My_PDF extends File_PDF {

function footer()
{
// Go to 1.5 cm from bottom
$this->setY(-15);
// Select Arial italic 8

Spent quite some time trying to make a little extension to the wysiwyg editor TinyMCE to upload and link to files in a page. I was trying to use element.setAttribute('href',link); but it for the life of me wouldn't work right. The entire scenario:

You could insert a link without problems.
getAttribute worked perfectly
element.innerHTML = 'something'; worked perfectly to change what is between <a href="url"> and </a>

Karinvandenberg.nl has been moved to a new server. It's my own virtual server hosted by VirtualConcepts

Ever have that? You think something is not working right and you spend hours trying to find out why, digging into source code, only to find in the end you just missed an option in the screen somewhere?

I've been trying out project management software the last couple of days. First there was phpGroupWare. All very well but when I hit add project, there was no form, just a title. Maybe something wrong in my config but it was a little too frustrating to figure it out. The way the whole thing worked was just not exactly what I was looking for in the first place. I don't need groupware, I needed project management. I know, closely related, but I needed something mainly to get an overview for myself, not in a group.

Yesterday I had the honour of graduating at Tilburg University. My Master Thesis about Open Source software evaluation is now officially published. It can be found here.

Update:

So far, the following sites have linked to my Thesis:

Because my laptop's combo drive was giving trouble and hasn't burnt a proper cd for months, I bought an LG external dvd writer this weekend. The LG GSA-5163d can handle all formats, - + Ram and + dual layer, and has USB2 and Firewire. Great, right? Almost. I tested it in Ubuntu and saw it mounted disks with data on it fine, and I burned a DVD in windows (happened to be on at the time), all worked great. Until I tried to burn something in Ubuntu....