Here’s the Deal

Amazon Kindle Store vs eBooks.com

72 35

48 7

When comparing Amazon Kindle Store vs eBooks.com, the Slant community recommends Amazon Kindle Store for most people. In the question“What are the best eBook stores?” Amazon Kindle Store is ranked 1st while eBooks.com is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose Amazon Kindle Store is:

Amazon being as large as they are can often undercut the pricing of eBooks. This is not always the case as a lot of eBooks have their prices set by the publisher. this is called agency pricing. But on non-agency eBooks Amazon is often the cheapest store.

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best eBook stores?

Amazon Kindle Store

eBooks.com

Pros

Pro
Often has lower prices compared to other eBook retailers

Pro
Self publishing

Amazon allows for users to self publish eBooks and audiobooks.

Pro
App for almost every platform

Amazon offers the Kindle app for just about every platform. So far there are apps for Android, iOS, Blackberry, PC, Mac, and Windows Phone 7. Conspicuously the Linux platform is absent from that list.

Pro
Offer optional subscription service

Amazon offers an unlimited (actually it is pretty limited) eBook service similar to what netflix offer for movies. Though the selection is on the smaller side compared to their regular eBook store.

Pro
Lots of 100% discounts

It's easy to get a lot of books for free if you use this IFTTT recipe.

Pro
Send eBook as gift [US only]

The Amazon Kindle store allows for users to send eBooks as a gift to any e-mail address of their choosing along with a custom message, though for now this feature is US only.

Pro
Kindle Owners' Lending Library

The Kindle Owners' Lending Library is a feature of Amazon Prime, a service that costs $99 a year that includes such features as free two day shipping on Amazon orders and a membership to their video and music services. The Kindle Owners' Lending Library has more than 600,000 books users can borrow (one at a time) with no time limitation.

Pro
Kindle Daily Deals

Amazon offers discounted eBooks daily for their "Kindle Daily Deals". The eBooks can be as much as 80% off the normal retail price. Though often the eBooks on offer of of low quality or unheard of titles.

Pro
Academic books

eBooks.com offers academic eBooks on their store that are claimed to be from the world's leading scholarly and academic book publishers.

Pro
Free excerpts

eBooks.com offers free excerpts for their more popular eBooks. This way users can get a feel on how the title reads and what it's structure looks like.

Pro
Very intuitive site

The site is very easy to understand and navigate.

Pro
Send gift certificates

eBooks.com allows for users to purchase gift certificates online worth 10-100 dollars and will then e-mail said certificate to an e-mail address of the purchases choosing along with a customized message.

Ad
Cons

Con
All eBooks are in a proprietary format

Unlike other eBook stores, Amazon does not offer .epub's (a free and open eBook standard) for their Kindle devices. What they do offer is a proprietary format that only will work on their own Kindle devices. Sadly this creates user lock in as there is no way to take those digital titles to another reader without stripping the DRM from them (something that may or may not be illegal in certain countries) and converting to a format that does work on said other devices.

Con
Amazon is an evil corporation

Con
Bad communication

Con
A lot of books are copy and paste from the web

Large selection, but there is an ever increasing numbers of books that are less than 100 pages, mainly created copying and pasting freely available information from the web. Searching for what you want is becoming difficult, with results showing lots of pointless and poorly written small books.