Like others, it’s the price of the books, not the price of the e-readers that keeps me from buying them. I think it’s stupid that the MP3 downloadable version of a CD costs almost as much as a physical CD despite having none of the costs associated with moving the product from location to location and considerable less costs for hosting vs manufacturing, and e-books are similarly stupidly priced. If e-readers were $150 but books $5 max, I’d buy one. As it stands I wouldn’t pay more than $20 for an e-reader considering I wouldn’t be buying any books for it at current book prices.
Many are already available on .epub files and whatever the kindle standard is. All e-readers, however, are .pdf compliant, so in the odd event that you find a book you want that doesn’t come readily in your format, you can open it in MS-Word, crank it up to a nice big font (20 pt. or so) and print to PDF. That’s what I’ve been doing and it works great for me.
I mentioned on a recent thread that under a $100 would be the deal breaker for me.
Yes, I know it is currently “only” $39 more, but psychologically, it makes it seem more like an accessory, and not major hardware, if it falls below the $100 mark.
Price of books? Well, that does seem to be a bit gouging - as others have mentioned, no paper, no printing, no warehouse storage or shipping - other than editing and some advertising, pretty much no cost except royalties. Seriously - to zap 100KB of data stored on a computer to another computer - and charge about $15? I hope the author(s) are getting paid well - at least then I wouldn’t mind so much.
Perhaps they should remember the old days when music CD’s cost about $25-$30 and why people started to get pissed at the greedy publishers - especially when you would hear horror stories of musicians getting paid pennies on the dollar for sales. (I believe back then, even with those wild prices, musicians were making maybe $1 per CD if they were lucky!)
I have a REB1200 and I wouldn’t use anything else. I’ve messed with the others and there are just too many buttons. I’m a klutz and my arthritis hates when I hold thin items. Free books, good e-deals and other places already mentioned make me happy enough. I prefer paper, but when traveling my ebook is a spacesaver.
I just bought the Nook for $149.00. I am extremely happy with it. I have not spent one cent on ebooks or audio books. I have about $1,000.00 worth of ebooks an audio books all free downloads. All are authors I like an have been waiting to read.
The price of the readers isn’t a problem, it is what they charge for the books. I can check books out of the library for free. I can even download audiobooks from the library for free.
$30 for the reader, $5 for the books and I might consider one.
I paid 300 dollars for the reader and bought a dozen ebooks so I clearly surrendered but I think ebooks shouldn’t cost more than 25 cents an hour. I also want a sane lending system in place.
I should be able to export them to other (DRM-free) formats and be able to lend them to friends. My friends should be able to read loaned books for free for a couple of weeks at least before their rights expire. If they like them, they can buy them, loan them and so on.
It just seems like such a nice way of doing things and it ought to be good for authors too.
Someone send this thread to the book publishers.
Five dollars for one e-book sounds awfully high to me.
They’re disposable reading material, not serious acquisitions. Anything that’s lastingly important, or that I really want to savor for its artistry, I’m going to want a nicely-printed and solidly-bound physical edition–a digital copy could be a preview version at best. And if it’s not that important, it’s more comparable to a newspaper (good deal) or a magazine (only some of which are worth their single-copy newsstand price)… so I guess I’m not interested unless e-book prices are around $1 or $2.
Given that, however, and a reader design that I really liked (haven’t seen it yet), I could see paying well over $200 for the device.
How do you reckon that?
Let’s just say that the price of the e-books does not concern me overly since I have methods to ensure that I can get them at a price I find congenial. That being said, charging more for a digital file than you do for the small size paperback is freaking stupid and unsustainable. You’re just begging people to perform an end run around your marketing model. If the authors would just put up their own websites (as many musical acts are doing) and offer their wares at a reasonable price that reflects their actual take of each book plus a decent percentage (since the average author makes pretty much bupkis from the actual sales of books) I firmly believe they’d make more money and the rest of us would be much happier with the price we pay to enjoy their labor. The middlemen will be pissed off, but fuckem. They only got to ride the gravy train because it was the only game in town, they don’t have any call to cry like butthurt bitches because a better game is available, one that the majority prefers to play. Grow or die, leeches!
I’d pay about $40 for a reader, but not more than $2 for the books. At that price, I’d get one.
I will go with this as well. For me, it is not that relevant how the price of e-books compares to new hardcovers, the price has to compete with used books from eBay, Amazon, Goodwill, garage sales, etc. Sadly, with the increasing popularity of these readers, the market price for used books will most likely start to rise.
I hope so. I’d like to see the physical book market supported.
The quality of the e-book readers needs to come up and the price needs to come way down IMHO; my wife was looking for one as a graduation present for me and all the ones that we could afford (ie weren’t $300 or so) had terrible, almost unreadable screens, or just reminded us both too much of Etch-A-Sketches (entirely too big and awkward to carry around).
I’m in agreement with the extortionate price of E-books, too. The Australian publishing industry is constantly bitching about how hard a time they have competing with foreign books, and a perfect opportunity comes along to do something about it (by releasing cheap but profitable E-books) and nothing happens. E-books from Amazon, for example, cost more to buy in Australia than they do in the US for absolutely no reason at all. The whole situation is bullshit.
I’d get one if:
a. it didn’t cost more than $50;
b. a choice of x number of books were included for the price, such that x ≥ any 10 off Amazon.
OK, this just made me go :rolleyes: :dubious: :rolleyes: at whoever came up with THAT pricing scheme. I’d LOVE to hear to have this person grilled mercilessly until s/he can come up with a satifactory explanation. And “because we thought we could get away with it” is NOT good enough.
But more often than is admitted openly “because we thought we could get away with it” is the real answer.
I’ll get one when I can navigate to my local library’s net, and their full catalog/virtual library and borrow any of their books direct download to the Reader.
Amazon’s rationale behind this was (IIRC) “The costs of servicing the [Australian] market”. Costs which are Zero because A) Amazon is an online business and is operating out of a different country (they have no Australian presence whatsoever AFAIK) and B) There’s no “increased costs” involved for letting someone in Australia or Burkina Faso or Switzerland download a book from a server instead of someone in the US.