I'm a sax player and I have all the current Real Books in print for C, Bb, and Eb instruments. I was considering scanning my copies to put on my iPad so I wouldn't have to carry three to six heavy books to a gig (depending on if I was playing both Bb and Eb instruments) and I was dreading going through the process of scanning then figuring out how to set it up so I could easily find the song I needed on the iPad. Then I find these! Hallelujah! Ever so rapidly I ordered all three volumes for Bb and Eb instruments for Kindle, had them load on my iPad and started looking through them. Yes! Yes! Yes! I can use this and the discounted Kindle version price makes it just that much sweeter. This saves me days of time, so it's worth it!
Now for a couple of annoyances, one small one and one big one.
The small one: It's clear Hal Leonard just scanned the pages and put the file in Kindle format. The music doesn't fill the entire screen, but on an ipad it's no biggie, just expand it a bit. The scans are clear enough and my eyes still good enough that I probably won't even have to do that, however it would be nice if the pages actually filled the screen.
The BIG one: The book is FULL of copyright notices, all on their own individual pages, sometimes more than one. OK, fine. The law requires them to be put in, but can't it be in an appendix in the beginning or end of the book?. If that wasn't bad enough, in some cases there are charts that span more than one page and the copyright notice page is in between the two pages of a chart necessitating an additional page turn to get to the second page of the chart! This is INFURIATING on a gig!!! The print version isn't laid out this way, why do it on the Kindle version? Good thing I have a bluetooth page turner with foot pedals so for me it's easy but someone who doesn't have or can't use a foot pedal page turner like Kindle users are just out of luck. It's extremely annoying. This isn't a book someone's going to leisurely read in an arm chair or as a reference book, musicians are going to depend on this to earn their livings as a performance tool. Hal Leonard should know better and it needs to be fixed!
Even with the annoyances, I still award it four out of five stars and I highly recommend this for gigging players. It's clear whoever was responsible for putting this together for Hal Leonard wasn't a gigging musician. Hence only 4 out of 5 stars.