zacharytamas

Like hordes of others, today I downloaded and installed the new Kindle for Mac beta.

So far, it’s a very nice app. It is very simple—but this kind of app is perfectly suited for simplicity.

The app took a while to open the first time, but once it loaded I was greeted with a Register screen which allowed me to register the app with my Amazon account and associate it with my Kindle account. The process took only seconds.

Books in your Kindle account are automatically loaded into the “Archived Items” tab, which acts as a sort of bookshelf—books you have access to if you want, but not important enough to be sitting on your desk. When you go to the Archived Items, you download a book to read by double-clicking on your choice. After it has downloaded, the book will automatically be added to your home page and then opened for reading at your farthest read page. As I have been reading a few books on my iPod Touch for a while, it was very nice to have them appear on my MacBook Pro at the exact page I had left in.

Reading in the app is also nice. You can resize the window to get as much text as you want (or don’t want) on the screen at a time. It has support for your bookmarked pages, and the user interface controls are pretty simple. You can use the arrow keys on your keyboard or the scroll wheel of your mouse (or in my case, two-finger scrolling with TouchPad). The mouse/touchpad feature is nice, however it is entirely too sensitive to be used carelessly—you’ll turn five pages before you realize it.

All in all, good job Amazon. There are a few little bugs such as the scrolling problem, but this is Beta software after all. It could be argued that the interface could be nicer, but for what the app is designed for it performs its function well—especially for being beta.

When the Kindle app for iPod/iPhone came out, it opened up the world of Kindle to me. I already owned an iPod which serves so many functions for me—spending hundreds of dollars on a dedicated book reader didn’t make financial sense (or cents) for me. However, when the Kindle app was released it was perfect because I was able to enter the Kindle world without any further investment.

And that’s exactly what Kindle for Mac is doing for many more users: opening the world of Kindle up, free of charge, to anyone with an Apple computer.

At the end of this semester I was left with some books that my college’s book store wouldn’t buy back from me for a variety of reasons (they had reached their quota on that book, the instructor was using a new book next semester, etc.) I needed to get rid of a few so I looked for places online I might sell. I had used Amazon to sell things before (books, actually) so I quickly found myself there.

It was extremely easy to list my books—all I had to type in was the ISBN and it knew everything about my book—and they were listed in just minutes. Amazon shows you their prices for the book, as well as other individual sellers’ prices to help you decide how much you want to sell yours for.

Within two hours I got an e-mail from Amazon informing me my Calculus book had just sold and I should ship now—the money was already in my Amazon Payments account. The only complaint I have about the whole process is Amazon’s high fee for using the service. I listed my book for $85 and in the end I received $73.90. Not that bad but still.

All in all I’d give Amazon Marketplace a pretty high ranking. It’s almost too easy. I barely had to do anything but list it and ship it. If you’ve got a few extra textbooks (or anything, really) laying around you want to get rid of quick, Amazon Marketplace is a good place to do just that. You’ll need an Amazon account but who doesn’t have one these days?

What other places online would you recommend to college students for selling textbooks?