Yesterday was a big fail on the part of Amazon and all of the other ebook providers, but mainly I suppose the fail was on the part of the publishers. I only think of the Kindle as the fail because this is what I had at my disposal as an ereader other than my iphone and computer. I have had the Kindle since christmas and I have yet to use it for anything other than a conversation piece.

Well as I said below, yesterday my daughter was home "sick" from school and slightly bored. (In actual fact the Kindle is hers - she was given it by one of early early early adopter friends and when she got it I thought cool, I can use that.)

So back to the story. She was home "sick" and we decided we should get the next installments in the series we were reading - Anne Mazer's Sister Magic. A fun read, lightly illustrated with line drawings and not something you need to have hanging out taking up shelf space. Perfect, I thought, finally a use case for the Kindle. In my oh so confident fatherly voice I told her we could get the series and start reading right away. Here I was willing to invest in about 5-6 books at one stop! Talk about impulse shopping.

Well the Kindle disappointed, Amazon disappointed, did publishers ever disappoint? No, not unless I pursued the reason why the ebooks weren't available. And this has to be a concern for any ebook vendor out there - perception! Who gets blamed when a book is not available?

Now I happen to know the behind the scenes story with agency pricing and publisher preparedness for the digital age but my impulse was still to think the Kindle sucks! Not only could I not get these books I wanted, but I also couldn't find about 4 other titles I wanted to read in digital. I am on an apocalyptic bent of late. I saw a table display at an Indigo store filled with fascinating titles like Slynx, and Battle Royale - and decided I would read these books in their digital format. Somehow it seemed appropriate to think the apocalypse would be brought to me on my iphone. I did decide to check Kobo first, Stanza's catalogues next and finally Amazon (don't like Amazon drm and that is that). Nowhere to be found -(note - I did not blame the iphone for not having the books).

The apocalypse would have to be provided by trees if at all. I may just forget this latest trend in my reading and if I do too bad authors, too bad publishers and too bad bookstores - my money is going to go toward investing in a good concrete bunker and a subscription to popular mechanics.