Kobo and ebooks

I've had my Kobo for about 3 weeks now and I hadn't really used it much. I've bought some ebooks and synced them to the Kobo, but that was it. For some reason last night I decided to give it ago. I started to read Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas. I had read about 80 pages in what seemed like a short amount of time and I suddenly wondered if I had missed
anything. It was an odd feeling and made me want to find a hard copy to check. Or perhaps it's just a very easy book to read.

I actually don't mind reading on the Kobo. The screen is clear and I've set the text at an easy to read size. The pages do take a bit longer to turn than a hard copy book... and it's very light. I still like the experience of reading the hard copy. But the experience of reading on a Kobo is just as pleasurable.

The only thing that annoys me about the whole thing is... well there's 2 things I think. The first is the price of new release books. Most of the new release ebooks I've seen are pretty close in price to the hard copy. It's crazy... when there are no printing costs they have to factor in, not
housing costs because it's all electronic. I would prefer to buy a hard copy version of a book when both formats are a similar price. I am refusing to pay more than $10... well unless it's a book that I really really want and then I won't pay more than $15. That may sound harsh and there have been cries of what about the author's cut? Well, as with print copies the authors only get a tiny percentage of the total price of the book. With less overhead costs they shouldn't lose out.


The second thing that it's really hard to find ebooks that I want. The search facility on the  bookseller's websites are dodgy at best, but worse for ebooks. This is because they don't work like a library catalogue, which makes sense, when you put in an author's name, or a title
that's what you get. I think bookseller's try to be like google... but even in Google when I search for a book title I will ususally get a webpage about the book... not so in a bookseller's website. When I search for a title a lot of the time I get totally random responses. But with ebooks, when I search for a title, I don't always get the ebook entry. The browse categories is ok, but everything is either all fiction or general ebooks. You can't browse very well by genre, and you can't sort by date of release. So I'm having to trawl through all this stuff... mostly erotic fiction, before I can find anything I'm interested in.