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The price of kindle books is a bit steep......
My wife bought me (and her parents) a Kindle. I love mine and have bought and read a number of books in it. It's a great little gadget which I really enjoy and aside a few gripes about its function, I think it's very nice.
However, the biggest gripe I have is that the kindle can become a very expensive little habit if one reads a lot of books purchased from Amazon. Really, at $9+ per pop, it can get pretty expensive in a short while. Given that the publishing, warehousing, storage, etc. of these books must be many times less expensive than hardback or paperback editions, it seems that the books should cost a fraction of the current retail prices...
Like I said, I love my kindle and all, but the other day I found myself looking around for yard or garage sales to look for used paperbacks... Typically, the cost of one of those is anywhere from $.10 to maybe $1.00 !! I don't expect Amazon to sell books that cheaply, but 50 to 100 times more?
I they want the Kindle to really take off, they have to make more books available at more reasonable prices. Specially considering that the purchaser cannot resell, lend or even give away the book after he or she is done with it...
However, the biggest gripe I have is that the kindle can become a very expensive little habit if one reads a lot of books purchased from Amazon. Really, at $9+ per pop, it can get pretty expensive in a short while. Given that the publishing, warehousing, storage, etc. of these books must be many times less expensive than hardback or paperback editions, it seems that the books should cost a fraction of the current retail prices...
Like I said, I love my kindle and all, but the other day I found myself looking around for yard or garage sales to look for used paperbacks... Typically, the cost of one of those is anywhere from $.10 to maybe $1.00 !! I don't expect Amazon to sell books that cheaply, but 50 to 100 times more?
I they want the Kindle to really take off, they have to make more books available at more reasonable prices. Specially considering that the purchaser cannot resell, lend or even give away the book after he or she is done with it...
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Mary on -
True the price of a brand-new book is a bit pricey, but far cheaper than buying the hardback version. I temper the cost of new books by downloading free books from one of the many sites available. I've been reading a few of the classic authors. ( something I've not done before except under duress in high school!) I'm currently reading Tolstoy, and have recently finished a Jane Austen book.
Check out the Free books section under Kindle. There are also a number of sites that sell books for a fairly inexpensive price. (.49 to 4.00) Even Amazon has books for free and low prices.
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Permalink Reply by Manuel on -
"There are also a number of sites that sell books for a fairly inexpensive price. (.49 to 4.00) Even Amazon has books for free and low prices." Thanks for the input. I did not realize that Kindle books could be purchased for lower prices. I need to find out how to download some of the free books. That might be a good solution to make the Kindle more relevant.
I still think that the current prices for the Kindle books are a bit high considering the lower cost of production and distribution.....
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Permalink Reply by Mary on
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If you like the classics, go to gutenburg project I've found a number of great titles there, and many more when I finish the 60+ books I currently have on my Kindle!
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Permalink Reply by Maya on -
I found a site that has five books for under $5 dollars. One is a Kindle book at Amazon, and the others are in HTML and you have to convert them by sending them through your Kindle email, but I think they're all good. The site is:
www.hotpresspublishing.com
See what you think.
Maya
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Permalink Reply by Martin on -
Perhaps Amazon will go to a subscription or rental model which may drive down the cost.
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Permalink Reply by Linda M Au on -
Actually, the only thing that's different in the pricing is the printing cost. There are still all the up-front costs of author, editor, publisher, copyeditor, proofreader, formatting and layout, etc. All those people in the chain still have to earn a living. It's just the printing company that doesn't need to get paid.
Also, I've looked at other e-book sites (for other formats) online, and I find generally that the Kindle books are cheaper than other e-books out there. I'm finding a ton of slightly older books for the Kindle that are 4 or 5 bucks. Not so much on other e-book sites I've been to.
Just a thought on the other side (and as an author myself who still wants to get paid to write!)...
Linda
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Permalink Reply by Cillasi on -
When a new book is released, it's priced at premium levels. You can expect this practice to carry over to e-books simply because that's the way it's always been done. Publishers will have to develop a new mindset before this changes.
It's the same with us readers. E-books, especially with DRM, negates a secondary market in used books. You can no longer trade/share/give away books, just like you can't go see a movie then give your ticket to a friend to go enjoy the same movie.
If you pay $10 for a paper book and 5 people read it, you are out $10, 4 others are out nothing, and the publisher only makes $10. If you pay $5 for an e-book, recommend it to 4 friends who each pay $5 for it, each of you is out $5 and the publisher makes $25. You do the math!
The only way to get the point across is to find your personal price break point and stick to it. Not saying there's not an occassional book at $9.99 you must have, but you can probably find lots of stuff at prices between $0 (public domain - not at amazon) and $7.
When the $9.99 and above sales begin to languish while books priced between $2-$7 are zooming off the shelves, so to speak, adjustments will be made. But, it will take time simply because there are not enough of us yet to create the 'zooming' effect.
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Permalink Reply by Manuel on
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Your ideas are cogent. It would seem that the appropriate pricing would promote much higher volumes of business. It remains to be seen if merchants will adopt such policies.
I think it would be much more profitable in the (not so) long run for Amazon and other retailers to offer the e books at much more affordable rates. Like you say, the price of the e books is quite high since they can only be used by one individual and there is no "trade-in" value left after purchase.
I really think that people like me would be very likely to purchase many more books if the price was better. Also, the sale of Kindles would increase dramatically once people find out that they can be a bargain on the long run. For now, after spending $300+ on the Kindle alone, it's rather painful to pay $10 or more per book, specially if you later find the book to be not to your liking (I've bought at least a couple of E books that I wish I had not wasted my money on....
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Permalink Reply by Patricia Irwin Johnston on -
Speaking as a publisher, let me add 2cents to this discussion. Publishers both large and small are intrigued by the ebook concept, but during this betamax vs vhs contest time when there are multiple formats out there, it's too expensive to convert to all of them.
Then there's the fact that many of these same publishers are having a hard time making the leap to Kindle format because of Amazon's pressure to try to keep the prices at under $10.00, which is coupled with the fact that the split Amazon demands on ebooks is quite lopsided--publisher gets something like 30% of what you pay, while Amazon takes the rest. From that 30% ($3.00) on a $10.00 book, we must pay the author a royalty the author is willing to live with as well as amortize all of those costs that Cillasi mentioned (editing and printing and binding and marketing and administrative costs it takes to bring a book to "print" in any form.)
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Permalink Reply by Cillasi on
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Actually, it was Linda Au who pointed out the costs. I pointed out the advantages of lower prices for all of us.
Amazon seems to have lowered Kindle prices on a bunch of older books that are still in copyright. You can find lots of older works of your favorite authors for between $2.50 and $5.00 now. It can only get better.
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Permalink Reply by Joseph Komen on -
It is 35% for the publisher and 65% for Amazon. That being said, I think Amazon wanted flexibility in lowering the price of the book over the publishers set price. They take the loss in revenue on their end when they lower the price and the publisher will get the same amount as per the original posting price (that is unless there is some other deal of which I am not aware). So, if the book is $10, in principal Amazon would get $6.50 and the publisher would get $3.50. However, Amazon often sells the price for less than $10...lets say they drop the price to $7.0. So Amazon would take the loss of the $3 on their end and get $3.50 from the purchase instead of $6.50.
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Permalink Reply by Manuel on
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Thanks, I'll look into it. I did look into some public domain and classical as soon as I can figure out the various downloading methods, I'll get some more reading material for my kindle. Ironically, I just got a gift certificate for Borders... What can I say, I got another three paperback books :-)
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