I read mostly technical stuff, mostly online articles, snd few books to begin with... I prefer physical books for diving into something more new to me as I tend to remember better with a physical book. I remember better with roughly where something is in the book. I don't get that with ebooks, I've tried. I don't go to the library as technology books are usually too dated for me.

Happy medium. I use the library for my 'summer reading books', the books you read once, enjoy and never thing about again. I use Kindle for books I really enjoy and want to read again (or for free/cheap summer books that the library doesn't have). I buy physical books for reference or if the library/kindle/nook/ebook provider does not have it available.

I buy physical books because they're cheaper than ebooks. I'll usually pay about $.50 to a buck for them. Sometimes my friends just give me a box of books they're done with. The local thrift store often has bestsellers for a buck.

The usual price for a used book on Amazon is $.01, which with shipping comes out to still far less than the ebook.

For ebooks, Amazon already has one free "rental" per month of select books, for Prime members.

There are other good sources of free books include this blog: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/category/books/free-fiction...

I did that once (don't remember what book) but in the end I didn't like it. While I don't like to re-read books it kind of annoys me that the book is gone from my list of stuff I've bought/read. Plus the limitation of 1 per month means you can't switch to reading something else unless I buy that something else.

I don't like losing access to things. If it was "you can download one per month and keep access as long as you're a subscriber" sort of the way Playstation Plus works that would be OK with me.

But the rental program feels more like a cruddy crippled library than a real service.

I'd rather pay the $5-$10 for the eBook and not have to deal with it.

This new service is interesting. I don't read enough for it to be useful, but I could see it saving my dad quite a bit of money (or trips to the library) if they had enough books.

Last time Amazon gave me a free trial of Prime, I tried out the free rental. As best as I could make out, it was only possible to use it by browsing on my Kindle, which was a rather suboptimal experience, allowing only specific search or a paginated list of about 50,000 pages. I couldn't actually find anything I wanted to read.

If you know how to use Amazon's interface it's possible to see the list of books online so you don't have to do all the browsing on the Kindle, but you still have to 'buy' it from the Kindle.

It's sort of a hidden link or a special way of narrowing search results with the criteria on the left side of the page. If you google I'm sure you can find instructions.

Here's the super-secret password for the clubhouse.

In the search box on the main amazon.com page, there's a drop-down list on the left hand side of the text entry. Click that and change it to "Books". Now just hit search (you can leave the text field blank). That will bring up a search results screen with a bunch of filter groups on the left. Scroll down and select "Kindle Edition" under "Format". After the page reloads, scroll down even further and you'll have a checkbox for "Prime Eligible". Select that, and you'll have only the books you can rent with Prime. You can then further refine by genre, search term, whatever.

The selection is generally pretty awful though.

You can buy it from your phone or computer. Even if it is a Mac. You pick which device you want it sent to. And I totally don't get that y'all are saying ebooks cost more than trad.and "awful" selection? What don't they have?

You can buy from anywhere. But the Prime free rentals can only be done from the Kindle device itself.

I was not aware of this. Do you get to chose the book?

Yes, but you can only read them on a Kindle device, not the app.

Oh, that's right, that's what really killed it for me. I'm used to reading on my kindle and picking up my progress on my phone when I'm stuck somewhere with some free time.

Losing the sync ability basically killed the main utility I get from eBooks. If I have to carry the Kindle around, I can carry a library book around.

Kindle Lending Library: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000739811

This is a good point. You could get the best of both worlds and just buy books on eBay for cheap. It's cheap and you end up with a physical copy.

> Happy medium.

An appropriate term to use in a discussion that's literally about different media for books.

These are all valid reasons. I read a lot of ebooks because I'm travelling a lot but if I move somewhere to stay there permanently I'm going to go back to buying physical books. As much for myself as for my kids to grow with books around.

> You can save a ton of money using your local library though.

I'm quite specific about what I want to read. My local library (that happens to be just round the corner) never has what I want. I often don't even seem to be able to order in what I want. So I gave up and just buy books on a Kindle instead.

I can get just about any book I want through the library: http://www.georgialibraries.org/public/pines.php

There's no catch. You order the book from whichever library has it, and they deliver it within a few days. Plus, the eBook loan program's collection gets bigger all the time. More states should adopt a system like this. The software behind PINES is free and open source: http://evergreen-ils.org/

last time i checked i could reserve on my local library probably a billion more books than what is available in the tiny kindle library. e.g. taocp

Yes, not to mention that some of the best books (e.g. by author R.A. Lafferty) are out of print and only available in libraries or for hundreds of dollars on the used market.

There's an entire corpus of literature between 1920 and 2014 that is out-of-print for licensing or estate reasons, rather than quality, much of which can be found in libraries.

Kindles are great for books I'll read sequentially, in which I'll never need to consult a specific section, and in which I'll never have to page back-and-forth. So, all fiction and most nonfiction I enjoy having in Kindle format. Textbooks and references I want to own in dead-tree format.