Buying My Own Ebooks

Well, I've been home for over a week now and mostly over the jet lag. (I still wake up at ridiculous hours of the morning, but the ridiculousness of those hours is lessening.) On Monday I got rid of the layer of dust that had settled over everything in the room I write in, while having a good long think about how I should tackle finishing The Traitor Queen.

You see, it's not just a matter of sitting down and continuing writing. After two months away I've probably forgotten small details of what I've done before. I need to read through what I've done to refresh my memory.

But that got me thinking. I haven't read the Black Magician Trilogy through for five years. And before then I hadn't read it five years before that. I could probably do with reading The Ambassador's Mission and The Rogue, too, to make sure the current trilogy is consistent. And heck, if I'm going to do that I should read The Magician's Apprentice as well. And it won't be hard to fit in the novella, The Mad Apprentice, on top.

Suddenly I had six and a half books and one novella to read.

Deadlines, deadlines! an inner voice whispered. Did I have time for this? The time I have left to finish The Traitor Queen is neither too short or too long if I get started now. Can I leave a reread until I've finished writing The Traitor Queen just in case? Well… I really should take my own advice, given many times during The Tour: that it's better to write a good book rather than a fast one. It's also quicker in the long run to avoid making errors than have to go back and fix them.

So that's what I'll be doing for the next week or two: reading everything I've ever published about the world of Kyralia. But as I dusted off the old, post-it filled paperback copies of the Black Magician Trilogy it occurred to me that I could try reading the ebook versions of my books this time.

Now, I could just get my pdf files or I could convert them to ePub. But the book-ready format of the pdfs tends to make the text too small to read on an iPhone, and I've not had much success with getting a readable file out of the ePub converting program that is most highly recommended (not naming names). Why go to all the trouble when I could just get one that's already been formatted? And this could be a good test of my own ebooks – both of the purchasing of them and seeing how they came out as ebooks.

Then I remembered my ebook availability list for Australian buyers. Would I even be able to get the books? I decided to update it:

Amazon – BMT, second book of AofF, TMA, first & second book of TST

Amazon UK – all books available (a bit odd as the UK editions of the BMT and AotF shouldn't be showing up for Australian customers)

iBookstore – Second book of AotF, TMA, first & second book of TST

Kobo – BMT, first two books of AoTF available, TMA, first & second book of TST

Angus&Robertson – BMT and first two books of AotF available, TMA, first & second book of TST

Borders – BMT and first two books of AotF, TMA, first & second book of TST

Dymocks – No books available

ebooks.com – No books available (what you can see are US editions, which is a bit weird as they're an Australian bookseller so ought to be selling the local edition)

Not a lot has changed. The Rogue has been added to most stores, which is no surprise. Angus&Robertson and Borders how have The Magician's Apprentice and The Ambassador's Mission added to their catalogue. The editions published by Orbit are available everywhere, but the missing titles published by HarperCollins are still absent – which is particularly noticeable in the iBookstore.

Which was annoying, briefly, because the only device I have to read these on is my iPhone and I usually read books in iBook. But I knew that there was a Kindle app for the iPhone. A quick investigation revealed that there is also a Kobo one, too. Angus&Robertson and Borders use the Kobo format anyway, so that left me with two format choices if I wanted to buy the Black Magician Trilogy and three if I wanted ebooks of the prequel and sequel.

Next I looked at price, though this mattered least to me. (You may be wondering why I'm buying my own books. Due to the technological complications of ebook territories and formats, it's easier for a publisher to tell their authors to buy their own ebooks and then reimburse them. It's something that they'll find a way around eventually, I'm sure, but right now I'd rather they spent their time and money working on ways to make my books available to everyone else than to me.)

Amazon were – no surprise – the cheapest with prices averaging around A$9.50. Kobo had most of my back list on sale at A$12.29 (down from $16.99) with The Rogue at A$19.99. iBooks had the Orbit backlist for A$12.99 and The Rogue at A$19.99. (The only HarperCollins edition up there is Last of the Wilds, which is down to $10.99.)

Personally, I think having a choice of booksellers to buy books from is a good thing. I also think multiple ebook formats is annoying and silly, but I'd rather that than one bookseller monopolising prices. Also, for this to be a good test, I should buy from a variety of sellers and use a range of ebook apps so I could compare the results. But to keep it from getting too complicated I chose the three main stores: Kobo for the Black Magician Trilogy, iBookstore for The Magician's Apprentice and The Ambassador's Mission, and Amazon for The Rogue.

Buying them using the iPhone was easy enough with all three apps. After I signed up to Kobo they sent me a 20% discount for my first purchase, which was nice. Then I started reading. As I've found with other ebooks or manuscripts I've uploaded as pdfs, I like reading on the iPhone. However, I've already found a few errors, omissions, formatting problems in The Magicians' Guild, and some things I dislike about the apps. But I'll wait until I've read all six books and tried all three apps before I comment. Then I'll summarise my impressions in a new blog post.