One of my main complaints, however, is that if I want a book for the Kindle that I actually have to pay for, it is often cheaper for me to buy a real book (you know, one made of paper) than to get the Amazon Kindle version. I can’t imagine that in this age of easily convertible electronic documents that offering an electronic version of books represents any significant ‘cost’ for the publisher. Shouldn’t an e-book at least be cheaper than a paper version?
Also — some books are so awfully formatted (with words getting split between two lines and other typographic nightmares) that I suspect no one from the publisher bothered to look at it when it was turned into a Kindle doc and dumped on Amazon. Free books from Gutenberg don’t suffer this problem, so there is really no excuse other than laziness/incompetence on the part of the provider.