It has been building for awhile. A frustration. An anger. That anger is with the retail book market in Australia.
It all fell into place for me this morning. I’ve been reading Todd Henry’s excellent Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day and loving it. I did not buy it from an Australian bookstore. My local big shopping centre only has one remaining bookshop, a QBD one. My preferred book shop is the big Dymocks store in the city. Both of these sell Die Empty for around $30 in paperback.
I bought mine from Amazon for the Kindle. For US$11.93. Plus for an extra US$4.49 I got the Audible version with Todd Henry himself reading the book. I had them both instantly and I can read them on my Kindle, my iPad or my iPhone. Now for the killer. The audio book syncs with the Kindle version, so when I listen in the car, as I did for about 25% of the book to start with, when I opened it up on the Kindle (or the app) it knew where I was up to and asked if I wanted to just jump straight there. So easy and so convenient. Even the hardcover is only US$14.82 from Amazon at the time of writing. Now I prefer dead tree books for many things, not least of which is the ease of lending it to a friend.So I may end up buying a paper copy at some point. The thing is, at that point, I will have paid approximately the same that I would have to just get the print edition from an Australian shop, but will have the book in three forms.
Yes, I do not mind paying a little more to be able to browse in a local bookshop and walk away with a dead tree copy of the book. But not that much more. And the convenience of having the book in multiple forms is a joy.
So as of today I have officially given up on Australian book retailers. Sorry guys, you have lost my business.
The remaining magazines that I read regularly (Sky & Telescope, Wired, HD Video Pro, AD in Spanish, Italian and French editions) download directly to my iPad either subscribed from Apple or Amazon. My goto store for books is Amazon.