Can anyone tell me why the e-books you download to the Kindle or Sony reader cost as much as the actual book?
Posted by admin | Filed under Books & Authors
I understand that writers and publishers need to get paid, but other than not having a room full of books why should we be paying standard book price for a download? I understand the benefit of having thousands of books all in one device but technically I’d be buying a device for $300 and saving no money in the long run. At least a real book can be traded into local bookworm book stores for credit.
December 31st, 2009 at 10:20 am
because the publishers and writers are greedy bastards.
everyone in the chain has to get a piece of the pie
write, publisher, reader manufacutrer etc, etc
they are all greedy bastards just like the musicians
January 1st, 2010 at 1:41 pm
Because they’re greedy. If you go to sites like Lulu.com and see self-published download prices, they’re much lower. $15 for the book, $5-ish for the download.
January 4th, 2010 at 1:53 pm
As the technology gets more common and popular, this will probably change. It’s partly supply and demand—not enough people want to buy books in the e-format, so those who do have to pay more for them to cover the expense of providing them to the public.
January 7th, 2010 at 2:18 am
My ebook, available in Kindle version from Amazon.com, is only $5.50. The other ebooks I’ve seen are around the same price, while the paper versions are usually $14-$17. Ebooks are considerably cheaper, as far as my experience tells me.
January 10th, 2010 at 11:03 am
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January 13th, 2010 at 10:50 pm
As far as I know, Amazon does quite a good job on price of books and Kindle books are cheaper than actual books. Sony, however, cannot provide content cheaper than actual books as they are not book vendor itself, and this is also the most complained by owners of the Sony Reader.
You can check the price of best sellers of Kindle books on Amazon, most of them are cheaper than the actual books:
And for books in public domain, Amazon provide them for free to download, which is impossible for actual books:
There are also more than 20,000 Kindle books which are lower than $1:
Yes, real book can be traded while ebooks cannot, this is the drawback. But I’m the kind of person who seldom sell the books I owned, I want to keep them for reference anytime. So the Kindle does save me quite a lot of money in long term.
Hope it helps.
January 17th, 2010 at 8:45 am
I don’t know much about the sony reader. But as a Kindle 2 owner myself, I have to say that it has saved me quite a lot of money in buying books. I’m an avid reader and right now I have about 20 Kindle books on the device. They are all cheaper than the actual books. I can foresee that I can even earn the cost of the Kindle device back after a year or so.
There is quite a good article talking about the price of the Kindle here:
Hope that helps.