If it were color, I would consider the $359 a bargain. I’ve spent more than that on game consoles, which this is roughly analagous to.
I’m itching for one, but I’m going to hold out for color, which I imagine will take a few years.
Stuff like mp3 playing ability is incidental, but too many books and (especially) magazines need color for proper presentation.
I admit I’m totally ignorant of how the cost breaks down when it comes to the average $20 book, but I’d be willing to bet that the cost of actually manufacturing the corporeal product out of paper accounts for at least 90% of the price that the consumer ends up paying. In fact, I’d be floored if the money to the author, the pay for the editors and cover artist and so on totals more than 5%, and I bet it’s closer to 1% or less of the average retail price. Book sellers and publishers are quickly coming up on the same issue that’s sinking the record companies and record stores - their entire business model is based on making their money off of the means of content delivery and storage (paper, printed on, bound and arranged - compare to physical plastic CD’s) rather than the actual intellectual property (the content) - but technology is quickly replacing that method of content delivery with a significantly faster, more efficient, and cheaper (for everyone involved) electronic method of delivery. Informed consumers - especially younger consumers - are aware of this, and simply won’t accept paying the same amount of money (or nearly the same) for a mere digital, non-corporeal copy, and they’ll resort to piracy if they have to.
Nobody under 30 even pays for songs on iTunes, because they recognize that the downloads simply are not fairly priced, and are barely cheaper than buying a physical CD. I think that the Kindle is similar - it’s great for the moms and businessmen out there, but the second a cheaper, better, and more attractive e-book comes out (and probably one from Apple) and the piracy starts up, people aren’t going to pay $10-per for mere digital books.
I find this weird, do you think about how much it costs when you buy Coke or a new pair of shoes? Prices are not fair or unfair, they are either what you want to pay or what you don’t want to pay, why the cost should come into play for anybody is a bit strange, IMO.
If the device were considerably cheaper, and if the book downloads were considerably cheaper, I’d consider it – if I didn’t already have a house full of books. I could take a year off and do nothing but try to catch up on the unread books in my apartment.
Get your ass back in here and give us a review. I’m thinking of buying one.
You know what else would be cool with a Kindle?
If I could download a copy of a book I already own a physical copy of for cheap. I already paid for the book after all, and I already paid for the Kindle (if I owned one), so why should I have to pay FULL PRICE again for the book, just to re-read it on Kindle instead of on paper?
If I own a physical (corporeal) CD (or VHS or vinyl or tape or 8-track or whatever) and I want to get the music (or video or whatever) on to my hard drive, there’s methods to do it. If not directly ripping from digital media, you can hook line in and record on to your computer. Assuming I’m doing this for the purposes of my own personal enjoyment and not to pirate the music, and it’s legal.
What’s the analogue for doing this with a paperback book? Me typing it in by hand as I read it, and then re-reading it later? Me chopping the book apart into individual pages and then scanning in to OCR? There’s no reasonable way to do it (that I know of). So, if I want to re-read that book on Kindle, I have to … pay full price for it.
Let’s say I sell the corporeal book I already own to a used book store (who typically gives 15% to 25% of the cover price). Can I now buy the digital version of that book for 15% to 25% of the cover price? How about 50% of the cover price (which is what used book stores charge for used books)?
Agreed. For example, I have .pdf archives of a few of my favorite print magazines, and I would love to have a kindle-like device for e-reading/viewing them. I would buy the Kindle in a heartbeat if I could, for example, e-subscribe to the latest e-version of Scientific American with all of the e-pictures and e-graphics included.
loves saying ‘e’
I really want one of these, but I’m a little afraid of it…I’m a very compulsive reader, and I’m afraid that I would be downloading new books willy nilly, and also that I would jump from one to the next too easily (after all, I’d be able to carry all of them with me at the same time, vs. only having one in my purse), and would never finish anything. I already have this problem to some degree with regular books!
Oops, never mind. It hasn’t come out yet. I just pre-ordered my own. We’ll be on the road for a year and I think this will be a very handy item.
I love my Kindle (original model, obviously), and even at the current price, to me it’s well worth the price.
The Kindle is smaller and lighter than even one hardcover book. Maybe slightly larger than a single paperback, but not by much. I can and do carry it everywhere. And I do find that it’s nice to have multiple books available - I typically find I’m in the middle of one “heavy” book and one “light” book at the same time.
The Kindle is also a portable bookstore. I can search for books, download a sample (typically the first chapter or two) for free, then purchase and download the full book if I want to read the rest of the book.
The Kindle is also a portable blog/newspaper reader. Actually I never really got into reading newspapers on it, but I follow a couple of blogs on it (most notably Huffington Post).
It’s especially nice for trips, both business trips and vacations. It’s not easy to find well-stocked bookstores during trips, yet those are the times when I seem to have bits of free time to read.
I can swallow the $10 cost of each book - of course it’d be nice if it were cheaper, but it’s not too bad considering it’s delivered wirelessly, and it’s in a format that doesn’t take up space in my bag or on my already full bookshelf.
Unfortunately, that’s not a fair comparison, because coke or shoes isn’t a question of content vs. means of delivery. There’s no way to get the essence of a coke drink without buying a bottle of coke; ditto for shoes. The closest metaphor, which doesn’t work at all but is somewhat close in mentality, would be having the option to buy a bottle of coke for $1.50 or to buy a picture of a bottle of coke for $1.29. It’s just an inherently illogical and unfair price option when you’re no longer actually buying the real thing.
We should probably take this to GD anyway, but it’s really the same debate as the mp3 pricing debate.
That’s a ridiculous comparison. A physical book is a vehicle for delivering content to you, the reader. A Kindle download gets the same content to you, by different means.
Maybe a more fair comparison would be: a book is like bottled water you buy at the supermarket. Kindle is like a filtered water delivery service, where someone comes and replaces your empty water cooler bottles with full ones. The latter is more convenient for some, but others may find it less flexible. But in either case you’re getting something that’s used for the same purpose.
Frankly, I really do have this issue with my Kindle to some degree. It’s so easy to download a book on impulse that I have at least three books on it that I’m in the middle of reading. Each time I was in the middle of reading something when I happened to hear of another book and thought, “Hmm, that sounds interesting. Wonder if it’s available on Kindle.” It was, so I got it, so I started reading the new book.
Ed
I do not believe this is a valid analogy. A closer analogy would be the difference between buying a bottle of coke for $1.50, and the same amount of coke in cheaper packaging for $1.29. This is a far more reasonable choice: I for one would pay extra for a glass bottle because of fond memories of lounging about on the grass at the University of Cape Town, watching the people go by. Other people probably wouldn’t.
The key point that makes the analogy wrong is that when people buy a coke they are buying a refreshing drink, which they will get no matter what the packaging looks like. For the book, they are paying for the content of the book, not the packaging. Unless you are referring to a person who buys a book because they are looking for a good doorstop, they are still getting the important part of what they are purchasing, no matter if it comes in paper form or in electronic form.
I would no more expect an electronic book to be a fraction of the price then I would MP3s to be a fraction of the price of the CD. The physical book or CD is not the main cost, and certainly not the main value, of the item.
A more fair analogy is with buying art.
You can buy a Rembrandt and put it on your wall, or you can download a picture of the Rembrandt which can only be viewed on your computer and not anywhere else.
If you want to loan the Rembrandt to someone. You can also sell it to someone. You can touch and feel it.
With the digital picture, you can only pull it up on your screen and look at it. You can’t loan it to someone else unless you take your computer to their place. You can’t sell it to someone else, unless you sell them your computer (and all of the other art that you have on it).
So, would you pay $15,000 for the original Rembrandt, or $14,890 for the digital download?
Actually, this is exactly why the Kindle is overpriced in my opinion: Right now, I can buy a Nintendo DS for $139 or a Sony PSP for $169 (Canadian). The Kindle has a larger screen, but far less processing power than a handheld console. From my admittedly non-savvy point of view, it’s a black and white digital photo frame with Acrobat reader installed. And I can buy a nice color digital photo frame for $200…
That’s not exactly fair, it uses eInk technology so it is in fact nothing like a digital picture frame. The problem as I mentioned is not that it doesn’t do more, is that it is too expensive for what it is supposed to be, a specific device for reading printed content. Like you said you can get a Nintendo DS, of course you aren’t getting an eBook reader really.
Another thing is that if I wanted to actually test one out before buying it I am SOL.
The eInk display is nothing like the LCD displays used in photo frames. It’s purely reflective, so it’s perfectly legible even in full sunlight. Basically, anywhere you can read a newspaper, you can read the Kindle display just as easily.
Also, the Kindle display uses no power to maintain an image. The only time the display uses power is when the display content is changed, e.g. when flipping to the next page. No matter how slowly you read, you can read an entire novel without having to recharge the battery in the middle. (That’s with the wireless feature turned off. With the wireless on, the battery only lasts a couple of days. I only turn it on for a minute when I want it to download new content.)
The down-sides of this display technology are: no color, and no backlight. But lack of color is not a big problem for reading newspapers and novels, and I have an LED book light that I can clip onto the Kindle’s cover.
I still think this overstates the main purpose of buying a book, which is to read the content.
Is it important to you to do all those other things? If yes, it sounds like the Kindle is not for you. If no, and I suspect this is true for many electronic book users, then the Kindle might be a good option, depending on how much you value being able to store a lot of content in a small space, the small discount on the price of content, the initial start up cost of buying the Kindle, etc, etc.
It really is all about the content. If it weren’t, then most people would be happy to read the Yellow Pages over and over, which despite its rather blatant physical-ness, is freely dumped in front of my condo every year (I wish they would stop!).
For full disclosure, I’d like to add that even if the packaging was the main factor, Kindle could charge $1million for each book and I would have no ethical problems with it. They can choose to charge what they like, and people can make a judgment call about whether it is worth it to them or not.