eReader price Wars are Escalating

Wiat, there are ebooks that are more expensive than their paper counterparts?

I’ve bought a lot of Kindle books and I’ve never seen that. Not that I don’t believe it happens–I’m just surprised that there are people to whom it has seemed typical.

I’m glad ereaders are getting cheaper. Personally I’m waiting till the market resolves itself so I don’t end up with the Betamax ereader, and find myself blocked from the material I most want to access. As others have stated upthread, I’m not interested in comparing any more features, and I’m not interested in being first to have new tech (not that its that new anymore, but still pretty young.)

I’m also not sure I will be able to control impulsive purchases of books, either (think kid, candystore).

I’m with you one this. I’ve been buying from the Sony ebookstore and I’ve been paying less than I typically pay for a hard copy book. I checked on the one I’m currently reading, American Lion (Andrew Jackson bio)

Sony ebook: $9.99
Amazon paperback: $12.24
Amazon hardcover: $24.98

I understand the argument that the publisher has much less overhead in delivering an ebook. However, my personal opinion is that I would rather they price ebooks at a price that makes the profit more attractive to them and to the authors so that more ebooks become available. When ebooks become THE WAY to publish and distribute, then let the price wars begin.

This is very much the way I feel about it. I’m tempted by the ability to carry around lots of books with me in a small space, and by the portable, easy-on-the-eyes way of reading PDF and other text files. But I already have lots of physical books on my shelves that I want to read when I can find the time—and hundreds of others on my wish lists. Buying something like a Kindle would only make the backlog stack grow higher.

Now, if only I could “rip” my physical books to a Kindle, the way I can rip my CDs to an MP3 player. Then I’d buy one in a heartbeat!

Remaindered hardcover or paperback: usually, significantly less than $9.99
Used copy of book: It depends, but often way, way less than $9.99.

Only a very small fraction of the books I buy are new books, very recently published—and of those that are, I can get some of them at BOMC2.com for $9.99. So why should I pay for an electronic file when I can get a real, physical thing that I can hold in my hands and look at and smell and touch and squeeze and love for the same or less. (And, ETA, if I decide I don’t want to keep it, I can sell, trade, or give it away.)

I by no means claim an eReader is for everybody, it certainly isn’t.

But on the issue of the backlog I found my Kindle had the opposite impact. The thing that drove having 25 books around my nightstand waiting to be read were:

  1. Not wanting to end up finishing a book with nothing else to read. Nothing more dreadful than finishing a book in bed and having nothing I want to read available for the train ride in the morning.

  2. Knowing I’d like to read a particular book but fearing I’d forget about it should I wait or lose access to it. Sure, I’m not in the mood to read that book on string theory right now but I know I will be in a couple months. But if I don’t buy it now I’ll never remember to buy it then.

With the Kindle I don’t have to worry about those things at all. When I finish a book I can shop for the next one from where I am. I see an author interviewed on the Daily Show and I can be reading the book (frequently, they’re not always available but then they wouldn’t be available to me in paper form either) in bed before the interview is done. I can put books of future interest on my wish list and wait until I’m actually ready to buy them.

As for price, I personally am not willing to pay more than $10 for most books (not because of cost of manufacture but just because of personal threshold) and end up paying less than I did for paper books for the most part. And free for all the public domain stuff I read, which was never the case with paper books where they generally cost at least a dollar in the used bookstore.

But if it weren’t for the always available shopping on the Kindle, I’d probably still be reading paper books (which I thought there was no way in hell I’d abandon when I bought a Kindle 2.5 years ago expecting to return it within the 30 day window).

That explains it. If that’s what Lynn and others were talking about as well, then it looks to me as though ebooks can never be satisfactory for you guys. There’d have to be a “used e-book market” and that doesn’t sound possible to me.

But the fact remains that, as far as I know, new books tend to be more expensive than their corresponding ebooks.

BTW this seems to be a roughly generational thing–roughly!–and certainly a “two kinds of people in the world” phenomenon.

The idea of valuing that which I can “smell and touch and squeeze and love” over an electronic file–assuming we’re talking about texts–is completely alien to me. I can’t fathom it to be honest.

It’s text. You don’t smell it, you read it. :smiley:

On the other hand, I do have one concern about the lack of physicality of ebooks. Part of my upbringing was the fact that there were always these wonderful books on shelves in my house that I could wander up to, rifle through, find something interesting, get lost in and so on–and I admit I’m kind of nervous about the fact that my kids–or perhaps their kids since I do still have a lot of physical books back from before my e-book days–won’t have this experience. Will they have a roughly equivalent experience when it comes to browsing through libraries of e-texts online? Perhaps–but it won’t be my “library” like the one I browsed through as a kid was my parents’. This does make me a little sad I have to admit–though I’m not sure whether it should.

Thank you AMEN. At last someone gets it :smiley:

I think this would be solved through libraries though. I mean books on tape are expensive, but I get all mine through the library. And let’s face it, if I wanted it illegally torrents and eMule are always there.

I would and could buy new hardbacks for all of my reading material, that is, I can afford it. However, I’m only willing to buy a few authors in new hardbacks. There are more authors that I’m willing to buy in new PB. And there are some authors that I will only buy in used PBs, and other authors that I’ll only buy in CLEARANCE used PBs (Stephen King and John Grisham, as I said earlier), which cost one or two dollars. I’m willing to buy new HB books if I know that I’m very likely to read and re-read the book several times, whereas with the clearance PBs, I’m almost certain to read the books once and donate them to charity afterwards. More than half of my preferred reading is in the “new PB” category, that is, if all other things were equal, if I could choose to buy any book in any of the price categories, I’ll probably pick new PBs to buy first. Most of the books that I want don’t even come out in hardback, only in PB! And it seems that most of the Kindle versions of the books that I’m interested in cost $9.99 and up. This is more expensive than most new paperbacks. An ebook might be cheaper or more expensive than the hardcover.

Also, checking my wish list, a lot of this seems moot. There’s no Kindle version available of a lot of the books I want.

I DO see a lot of older books being offered at very attractive prices, though. If this trend continues, I might have to get a Kindle, just to get copies of the older books. One disadvantage of buying used books is that you never know what they might have been subjected to, and a lot of times I’ve bought a copy of a book that I desperately wanted, even though the copy was in bad shape.

The thing is, it seems to me that right now the Kindle is being marketed mainly to that subset of the book-buying public that regularly buys new, recently published hardbacks—but that they could, and quite possibly will, broaden their appeal if and when the pricing structure changes. There doesn’t necessarily have to be a “used e-book market,” but there does have to be a way to appeal to people who are interested in a book but not interested enough to pay $24.98, or even $9.99, for it. An electronic equivalent of the way books are first released in hardcover, then later in significantly cheaper paperback and/or mass-market paperback, and sometimes as remainders or discount copies.

Maybe there would be some sort of equivalent to hardback and paperback versions of e-books, with the “hardback” versions being more expensive but somehow having extra content or prestige (fancy illustrations? author interviews?). Maybe an e-book would start out fairly expensive when it’s first released, and gradually decrease over time until it costs less than a new paperback. Maybe once a book gets to where used copies are going for less than a dollar (not counting shipping) on the Amazon marketplace, the e-book will be available for a couple dollars.

Generally there already is “hardcover” and “paperback” pricing on Kindle ebooks. Generally once a hardcover book comes out in paperback the price comes down on the Kindle version as well (though not always and not always immediately, there’s a lot of tussling going on between Amazon and the publishers over pricing).

But yeah, it is definitely true that if you acquire most of your books used or from libraries, are happy with that (as a lapsed librarian I’m a heretic in that I hate using libraries for recreational reading) and don’t place much value on the technological benefits then an eReader is definitely not for you and it is a wonderful world to live in where everybody can do it in the way they prefer.

Where, please? Because, if it’s here in Fort Worth, I would love to go browsing.

That is a problem, but it’s getting better. Fortunately, my free time for reading has been so limited since I got the ereader that I have not had a problem running out of things to read.

I am hoping that, in time, we will see the same thing happen that has happened with movies with the $5 bin at Walmart. Maybe, the publishers will re-release some older stuff that I can see spending $5 to read again.

I go to the Half Price Books on Hulen (near Hulen mall) and I35 S (exit 1187) mostly Google Maps which are locations C and F. Both stores have clearance shelves in the back, ask about them if you don’t see them. Probably other HPB locations also have clearance shelves. The selection on those shelves is even more variable than the regular selection. My daughter worked for HPB for a while, and she says that part of her responsibilities were to check her designated section each day, and to pull out any books that had been there too long, and move them to the clearance section. If a book stayed in the clearance section too long, then it was pulled and recycled.

There’s also a section for remaindered/overstock books in HPB. At least, I assume that they’re remaindered or overstocks, as they have several copies of the same title which appears to be new, not used.

Most of the stuff in these sections is, predictably, crap. Or so it seems to me. However, there are gems in these areas often enough that I’m willing to search through the shelves. And, of course, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

::grumble:: Ignore my references to locations C and F above, it looks like the location tags change according to how the map is positioned.

I know where that one is. There is a HPB closer to home in Bedford.

I can remember when the whole store used to be like you describe the clearance rack. Now, it’s mostly mass-market paperbacks and recent hard covers at half of the the jacket price. However, half of the jacket price is close to the same price you can find them for new at Target or Sams. It’s still a neat place to go browse after dinner on a night out, though.

The woman who started the chain was very concerned about ecology and getting bargains for her customers. I think that when she was still alive, the stores would hold onto the books longer, to allow them to be sold. I think that the chain now has policies which move the unsold books to the clearance racks, and then to the recycling bin, much more quickly, and I think that’s a mistake. Not everyone is going to go bookshopping every week or 10 days. However, I’m not the one who makes the policies. I just make sure to hit the clearance racks first when I do go shopping in one of those stores.

Yeah, the HB prices are close to the same price that you’ll find at Target or Sam’s…but Target and Sam’s have a much narrower selection. I very much doubt that I’d find a science fiction or fantasy title in HB in one of those stores, for instance. Heck, it’s hard enough to find SF/fantasy in PB in those stores!

I live at I35 and Seminary/820 (south side, not north side), so those are the HPBs that I’m most familiar with.

Oh, it’s possible to have a used ebook market. People do it all the time. It’s just not legal.

The current ebook pricing issues are very, very complicated and seem to be growing more complicated by the week. New York (publishers) is busy trying to reinvent the wheel to be as dysfunctional and counter-intuitive as the rest of publishing. Meanwhile, independent epubs have long ago solved many of the pricing issues (and all the related royalty issues and turning a profit issues) long ago and have been chugging along quite happily. If you think it’s frustrating as a consumer, imagine how frustrating it must be to have your livelihood depend on this clusterfuck.

I’ve just recently started trying out a few books from Amazon’s Kindle Store, using a Kindle app on my laptop and my iPod Touch. I have no problem with reading text on the backlit screen, but I sure do have a problem with the pervasive scanning errors. I read a story about the firebombing of London in WW2, in which the word “burn” naturally occurs frequently; it almost invariably appears as “bum”! Another frequent problem is quotation marks being transcribed as letters (usually C). This seriously devalues the ebook experience for me.

Really? I’d think in any such “market” the ebooks would very quickly of necessity become free.

Not necessarily. For example Amazon could (relatively easily) create a system wherein, for a price I relinquish rights to my digital copy of Book X purchased from them and transfer those rights to another person.

And whenever I log into the network Amazon deletes any titles I’ve sold (in case I restore my copy from another back up source). Sure, I could “steal” a copy this way but only if I never again let my Kindle connect to the internet. They could even take a cut for themselves and another royalty for the author/publisher.

The Nook already does this to a degree with their lending feature. Where you can loan a digital book to another person for two weeks and for that period the book is no longer available on your Nook.