We finally got to try SinMa Kopitiam, and it wasn't too shabby. Maybe I've been overly traumatized by Kopi Kaki, but this place at least felt decent. I think their bak kut teh is the best item on the menu and is totally worth going back for. Their kopi options are legitimate, so that's also good, but I was a bit disappointed that they don't have yuan yang on the menu. The other stuff we ordered was okay, but not necessarily something we'd queue for at a hawker center, if you get my drift.
Because the Dungeon Crawler Carl books are available on Kindle Unlimited, today I found myself wondering if it was time to sign up for the service instead of "buying" titles individually. I say that with quotation marks because (as I've blogged about many times) we all know that buying digital content with Digital Rights Management (DRM) really just means you have, like, a semi-exclusive lease to a particular copy of the book. But Amazon has also demonstrated its ability to remove books from your library when there are issues, which rather sucks.
I'm subscribed to various Kindle Deals services, so I pick up an average of 3-5 books on sale per week. Many of them are free, but others go for about $0.99 to $2.99, which means I'm pretty much paying about the same (or more) than a Kindle Unlimited license. A lot of these sale books are also Kindle Unlimited titles, so maybe I'm being silly staying off the service as I fill my library with a lot of crap. I do my best to only buy books while they're on sale, but I still occasionally get titles at full price, primarily for our family book club. I had Gemini run the numbers, and it claims that I start to recover the cost of my subscription as long as I read over 5 titles a month. Given my 1-book-a-day reading challenge, I suppose I'm pretty much the perfect candidate for a service like this. And while most of the Unlimited library consists of indie titles and other Amazon Originals, you still get surprise gems like Dungeon Crawler Carl being there.
This led me to explore the possibility of getting something like Comixology Unlimited or Marvel Unlimited to supplement my comic book reading. It looks like a lot of titles are already covered by Kindle Unlimited, so that's a bit more bang for my buck. But I have been feeling the pinch of Amazon having nerfed the discounts for Marvel comics, as the titles never seem to go on sale anymore for my account. I used to pick up back issues at half off, which always feels like a great deal. Plus, the old Comixology would allow for DRM-free downloads for specific titles. The bulk of my comic book reading is Marvel-based (Spider-Man forever!), and the DC and Image (or more specifically Skybound) titles I follow don't really go on sale either and may not be on either Unlimited service.
My near-future plan involves (1) probably signing up for Marvel Unlimited after my next credit card cycle date so I can catch up with more recent releases and stop waiting for Marvel titles on my wish list to go on sale, and (2) signing up for Kindle Unlimited after I finish my Discworld re-reading of the Witches books in order to continue Dungeon Crawler Carl that way. It would be smarter to wait for some sort of annual deal to get a discounted rate, but I don't know how long I'll have to wait for that. I'll stop buying my penny queer romances when they are part of Kindle Unlimited. It looks like even some of the Star Trek comics that I've been waiting to go on sale are also part of Kindle Unlimited, so I may not be able to wait for Cyber Monday in November.
So let's stop buying licenses to digital books and just give in to subscription services. Whee.
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