Find eBook Readers Blog   Reading in the Digital Age

The nook is now officially sold out for Christmas.  Barnes and Noble is telling purchasers of its new ereader that as of today pre-ordered nook ereaders will not be shipped until after New Year’s.

All customers ordering a nook beginning today, November 20 should expect their devices to ship beginning the week of January 4, 2010.  To assist those customers who are purchasing nooks as holiday gifts, we have created a special holiday certificate, noting an expected January ship date.  Beginning today, any customer pre-ordering nook as a gift will have the option to receive a special certificate at no cost — either in-store or via mail, for those pre-ordering online.

No doubt all of this competition to the Kindle ereader’s current supremacy has encouraged Amazon to fill some of the little chinks in the Kindle’s armor of late. Little chinks such as Kindle for PC and Mac and Blackberry (coming soon). And other little missing bits and pieces such as folders to better organize one’s library on the Kindle.  The latter is something users of the Kindle ereader have been asking for for a long time.

Amazon announced on its Kindle Facebook page that folders will be added via an over-the-air update during the first half of next year.  It seems a bit odd that Amazon released the news first on Facebook and only belatedly on its Kindle forums, but it is welcome news for Kindlers never the less.

It seems that Amazon is seeking to counter competition by adding some of the missing features to the current Kindle model, and this may be an indication that we shouldn’t expect a new iteration of the Kindle ereader in the very near future.  On the other hand, possibly this strategy will give Amazon a bit of extra time to develop some really killer features for the next Kindle edition.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Comparing the eBook Stores
• Nook Gets Update V 1.2
• Barnes & Noble nook Review at Cnet
• Barnes and Noble Gift Cards Will be Usable for eBook Purchases
• Barnes and Noble nook eReader Shipping Date Slips; Still No News of IRex’s DR800SG

There has been an ongoing  sweepstakes at Amazon and this week the prizes are Kindles and accessories.  All you need to do is start a wish list or add to your current wish list.

Possibly Related Posts:

• No More nook eReaders for Christmas; Kindles to Get Folders
• Comparing the eBook Stores

I’ve done a few price and availability comparisons of  ebooks at the various ebook stores before with a handful of titles, but thought it would be useful to do a comparison with a larger sample.   After all, the content provider for a particular ereader is a feature that definitely needs to be considered when choosing which ebook reader you will buy, especially if the ebook reader  in question is primarily confined to one provider for DRM’ed ebooks.

Choosing the Books

First of all I went to Borders and made a list of 110 books.  I chose Borders as they do not apparently sell ebooks (not in the U.S.  anyway) and I didn’t want to know in advance if a paper book was also available as an ebook when I compiled my list.  I tried to stay away from very new books, as most ebook stores make a point of selling current bestsellers for $9.99.  Therefore, you will not find The  Lost Symbol on my list, but Angels and Demons is there.  I chose paperback versions in all but a very few cases where they were not available.

My list totals 110 books, of which 34 are non-fiction and 76 are fiction.  The non-fiction selection contains no textbooks, but rather is made up mostly of history and science titles that might appeal to the general reader.

The eBook Stores

The ebook stores that I used for the comparison were the Sony eBook Store, the Kindle Store, Barnes and Noble and Shortcovers.  The big three because they each support their own ereaders; Shortcovers I added because I have noticed a few titles had very good prices in past searches.

So how many of the 110 paper books on my list were available as ebooks?

I already knew that Shortcovers offers fewer titles; I included them because I wanted to see how well they hold up on price across a basket of books.  I was somewhat surprised that Barnes and Noble had just over 20% less ebooks available than Kindle.  After all, it’s not as if  a lot of the books on my list are obscure titles; many are by popular authors.  If Barnes and Noble’s new nook ebook reader is going to “kill” the Kindle I think they are going to want to stock up with some more ammunition.

Comparing Prices

The chart below shows how much it would cost in total to purchase all of the 66 ebooks available in common at the Kindle, Sony and Barnes and Noble ebook stores.  I have also included the paper book cost from Borders.

Since Shortcovers has a smaller basket of ebooks than the other 3 stores, I  do a separate comparison with the 51 ebooks that they have in common with the rest.

Conclusions

The Kindle Store is obviously the winner, both in number of titles and prices.  In the first group of 66 books you would have saved enough buying Kindle vs. paper books to almost pay for your Kindle.

Sony and Barnes and Noble come in 2nd and 3rd place respectively, until you throw Shortcovers into the mix that is.  Actually the prices on Shortcovers were all over the place – from slightly cheaper than Kindle to more expensive than any of the other stores.  Also, one of the books on my list The Angel Experiment by James Patterson was free everywhere except Shortcovers where it was $8.79.

If your ereader supports Adobe Digital Editions it would probably be a good idea to check Shortcovers’ price on any title you plan to buy as you will probably find some bargains.

Update: For brevity’s sake I didn’t want to include the list of books I used for my sample here.  Instead I tried to put it elsewhere and link to it.  When I tested the link it seemed to be working, but I found out later that it in fact wasn’t – sorry about that.  So I am adding it below.

A couple of notes: Putting together this list was quite tedious and most of it was done late at night.  I tried to put myself in the place of a new ereader owner and not be influenced by what I already knew about which titles were or were not available as ebooks.  Perhaps I got a bit too much in character and included a couple of books by John Grisham who doesn’t release his books as ebooks yet.  After I realized my mistake I decided to leave these in the list as a new ereader owner may very well not realize this either.  Also I threw one title out of the list: The Stand by Stephen King.  This ebook sells for $15.00 (I think it was cheaper when I made my list) in the Kindle Store, $17.50 at the Sony Store and $40.00 at Barnes and Noble.  Sony and B&N label this clearly as the “Complete and Uncut” version, while there are indications that the Kindle version is as well, but I couldn’t be 100% sure.  Also I wasn’t looking for one title with such a huge price difference to skew the results.

My book list follows:

Possibly Related Posts:

• No More nook eReaders for Christmas; Kindles to Get Folders
• Nook Gets Update V 1.2
• Barnes & Noble nook Review at Cnet
• Barnes and Noble Gift Cards Will be Usable for eBook Purchases
• Barnes and Noble nook eReader Shipping Date Slips; Still No News of IRex’s DR800SG