Books

couple of days ago i ordered a kindle 3. super exited for it because it felt like the right time to get into the e reader boat. 
 
so why did i cancel? because after some research i found out that international (holland in my case) customers are in for a nasty surprise when using the kindle store! 
  
everything is waaay more expensive (like 4-5 dollars more), almost no free books. (books like dracuala, pride and prejudice, great expectations and even origin of species all cost 2,50 instead of free)  
 
and to top it all off i have to pay 1 dollar per megabyte for the wireless delivery. since when is the internet so expensive??  
 
this left me quite angry to be honest but i did not cancel jet because i loved the device so much.  
 but when i found out that most kindle books were actually more expensive than their real counterparts, i just could not go through with it.  
 
I wonder why this is not more documented? because i had to dig quite deep before i found out. and btw doesnt this just totally f-ing sucks?  

I don't blame you. Do you have Barnes & Nobles in Holland? They have their own version of it. It might be different, but I don't know much about it.

@gingertastic_10: wel not really but i can get one second hand, for 140 euros. maybe i will do that. is it a good alternative for the kindle or would i just be buying old tech? 

@BetonneTom: I haven't used one, but here's a CNET review of it. Hopefully that will help, it's for it's newest model.  

@BetonneTom: They just brought the kindle to the UK so if you can, wait 6 months and I'm sure they will be selling native European kindles as well. Right now the UK store seems fine with plenty of free books including the ones you described so it will cross the channel soon, don't worry.

That's horrible, especially charging money for books with no copyright and that are free to everyone. The bandwidth charge is bad, too, especially since Kindle files are tiny.

The public domain stuff can all be downloaded from Project Gutenberg for free, so that's no biggie. The rest of it is pretty bogus, though.

A few days ago I tweaked my Amazon Kindle account a little bit, because I was testing out the Kindle iPhone app. I too came to the same conclusion about the online store discrimination, which is actually pretty common. So I basically set my location to be in the US and used the same address I have for my PSN account (which means that I live in a mall in LA). After that everything that shouldn't have been free was free. 
 
Although I don't recommend going this path, because it's always possible they start doing IP checking and thus cutting you off, like Hulu and Netflix do. It's what happened with my PSN account and those bastards don't want to accept my dirty terrorist European money any more.

@BetonneTom: regarding the '1   dollar per megabyte for the wireless delivery.' as far as i understand, you only pay when you transfer content to your kindle using the let-amazon-convert-your-files-for-kindle service. you do not pay for delivery when you buy books from the kindle store. but i haven't verified this yet.

@Shayo: Haha that's too funny.  How long did it finally take them realize that you were using a false address?

@Shayo:  I still remember my address from when I used to live in Seattle so I use that for a lot of online signups. Now if I only remembered my BoA account number ... Hrmmm.

@GTFShadow:  About two years. And the problem wasn't so much the address, but my European IP. I mean, I understand the country limitation of services like Netflix and Hulu, with all that licensing crap and the need of IP blocking, but with PSN games? On a console that's region free? It still boggles my mind why the European PSN is lacking in good content. 
 
I'm stuck with PSN cards, which are a hassle to acquire. The US ones at least.

As far as I know, there are many good websites that offer out-of-copyright ebooks for the Kindle.  I believe the Kindle takes and uses the (.mobi), (.prc) and (.txt) file formats (just as long as they are DRM-free which most are I believe) 
 
Lane suggested Project Gutenberg, but I would say try out Munseys.com and Manybooks.net for English-based non-DRM ebooks that are well formated.