Yes, but the thing is we’re trying to eliminate clutter in our house nowadays, not add to it.
Especially since we now have a toddler.
My sister loaned me her Kindle so I could see what one was like. Yes, there are some very nice things about them.
However, I simply can not afford one. At all. All this talk of them being “inexpensive”? Those people don’t live on my budget. That’s one enormous downside from my viewpoint - if you’re poor you can get quite a few books for the price of a Kindle device. What good are e-books to me if I can’t afford the device required to read them?
(Yes, I know - you don’t specifically need a Kindle to read e-books, but the same applies to any electronic device for e-reading. I happen to own a PC, so I read on the PC, and if I owned a Kindle I’d use it but the fact is I don’t own one right now and there’s no money in the foreseeable future to purchase one)
Well thanks for taking a courageous stand for…uh…high prices, I guess.
I’m not taking any kind of stand. I’m just saying that “cost of production” has very little to do with how much I am willing to pay for something. Neither does how much profit the other side of the deal is making.
If it is different for you, that’s fine. But I’m curious if you get upset at a movie theater because they charge the same price to see the latest $8 million dollar indie movie as they do the $300 million summer tent pole? If eating at a restaurant would you complain about paying $12 for the dinner salad because you learned that the chef makes it from wild ingredients he picked for free while walking to work that day but happy to pay it because instead he has the ingredient shipped in by gold plated mule, costing him $11.75?
I’m not for high prices per se, but I for everything I buy I have a willingness to pay up to a certain amount. What that amount is, is minimally impacted by how much profit the other side will make at that price.
“I"m not willing to pay $8 for an electronic book because what I get in return for my $8” is an argument that makes perfect sense to me. “I’m not willing to pay $8 for an electronic book because it only costs them $1 to make it” is a weird argument to me. But me finding it weird isn’t reason for anybody to abandon it.
perhaps one option that scores the kindle highly is the iternet access.
I have the 3g version and for someone that travels a lot it gives me access to the internet pretty much everywhere without any crippling data costs.
yes the browser is clunky but it gives me access to my favourite sites and lets me post messages such as this.
i`ve had it for a few months now and it spurred me to read more and more varied works. when the uk libraries sort out kindle lending it will be perfect.
In my case, the cost of the item DOES affect how much I’m willing to pay for it. I’m willing to pay a reasonable markup, but what I consider to be reasonable and what the seller considers to be reasonable are probably two different things.
There’s a particular department store that I won’t shop at. They are constantly running huge sales on many items…and that tells me that they’ve marked those items wayyyy up, in order to mark them down again at intervals. There’s a crafts store that sells furniture, but every single week the furniture is advertised as being 30% off.
It’s quite possible that I’m weird this way. I’m weird in a lot of ways. But if I think that the seller has priced the product unreasonably high, in comparison to the cost of making that product and getting it to me, then I won’t buy the product. And I think that I should see a discount on ebooks, compared to the paperback price. The sellers are incurring fewer costs (to my mind) because they aren’t physically printing, shipping, storing, and remaindering the ecopies.
I do buy books for my Nook, but I don’t pay more than paperback prices for those books.
How about if I add “…and if enough people take the same position, the price will come down.”
For price, I compare it to music. Books and CD’s used to cost about the same (paperback). Books even a little less than your average CD. CDs were a rip off and everyone knew it, then digital music became available and, well you know the rest. If an album of music can be sold for $9.99 for damn near everything (and that’s still a rip off, but whatever I can live with it) a digital book that retails for $6.99 in paperback can sell for less than $9.99.
If every eBook was priced at the same cost as the paperback or a buck or two less everyone would still make money and few people would complain. Like I said, I think Baen’s model of giving an e book copy to everyone who buys a hardcover is ideal.
Hasn’t worked so far with other forms of digital distribution - ITunes songs are still around $1. On the other hand, those self same publishers may find that they are a no longer necessary middleman like the record companies are beginning to discover. But that will mean that there will be books only available digitally as authors leave their publishers behind. I suspect that is what is behind their grab for money now…their functionality after hundreds of years of owning an expensive means of production is disappearing. Now, an author can write a book, hire a freelance editor, publish it on the internet for $2, market it via social networking and make more money than they made with a publisher in the mix. And starting authors can take the hassle of getting your first book published right out.
Value is one of those subjective things - as Broomstick said, she can’t afford a Kindle. In her circumstances, the library and used books are going to factor heavily - she isn’t about to casually pick up a $24 hardcover bestseller because it just came out or spend $80 on a specialty item with a small print run that has to do with managing IT as a business (a few of those are on my Kindle). But my household finances are pretty different than Broomsticks - both my husband and I do both (and my daughter does the first). Lynn considers the way a retailer markets regarding price when making purchase decisions, I avoid WalMart because they are passing on savings to you - but they get their savings by pressing their suppliers to lower costs, having their suppliers deliver a lower quality product, and paying their people (both at the WalMart level and usually at the supplier level once WalMart has done its cost press) poorly.
I’ve had a nook for a while now, and I would say the advantages are purely convenience. You can carry as many books around with you as you want (great for travelling!) and you can buy books instantly from where ever you are. Personally, I like it because I have ADD, and I have trouble focusing on what I’m reading, I’ll get bored and start something else, then leave the first book somewhere and forget about it. I put whatever book I’m reading on the nook on it’s own “shelf” at the top of the list, and then I can’t misplace it somewhere. And I have a rule that I can’t have more than 3 on that shelf, so I’m actually finishing books more than I used to, which is cool.
No, it’s not as nice as having an actual book on the shelf, but then again, I don’t necessarily want to keep every book I read for the rest of my life. Some are good for a couple day’s entertainment and that’s it. I still buy books, and I still get books from the library, but my nook has it’s place, too.
I’m with **Thudlow ** - that link just talks about books being removed from the Amazon Kindle store, not people’s Kindles. Very different thing.
And regardless, as others have pointed out - if you’re really worried about Big Evil Amazon randomly deleting your books, just turn off the wi-fi on the Kindle and/or make backups on your computer. Voila. Problem solved.
I’m posting this for free from a remote South African village, where I have a library of books and a 24/7 bookstore in my hands despite not even having a food market for miles around. I think I’ve read around 30 books since coming here a month ago. Previously, travel meant I was limited to one or two books that I could hand carry and whatever random crap I could swap them for at hostels. Mostly, it meant I had to give up reading. Now, I can read whatever I want whenever I feel like it, even stuff that is banned where I am (a big plus in China)- plus, I can get internet access the current copy of the Economist pretty much wherever I am. Freaking lifesaver.
You could say that about anything. I assume you’re just sitting in your cardboard box waiting for everybody to refuse to pay current prices for anything so that prices will come down? And that you’re in the grocery store demanding to know the manufacturing cost of any product you consider buying so that you can determine if the price is warranted?
If I view the book I bought as worth the X amount I spend on it, why should I deprive myself of that benefit in the hope that they will someday reduce the price to what you think it is worth paying? I’m not unhappy with the transaction.
And conversely, if they reduce the price of the next Dan Brown novel to whatever you think it is worth (hopefully, somewhere south of a quarter), if that is more than what I think it is worth (anything less than them paying me to read it would be) should I buy it anyway to reward them for meeting your price preference?
That’s exactly why I dislike a lot of televangelists, not the least of which is the infamous Jimmy Swaggart. I mean, he has a television ministry, but he uses that ministry to go on air and complain about how the medium is corrupting us. Hello?! Why does he use the medium to complain about how it’s corrupting us? That, I will never know.:smack:
Well I’m not stupid enough to rush right out and throw my money away paying premium prices the second a new technology hits the shelves, like some technophiles I know.
Yes, the smart thing would have been for everybody to wait until next year when a 32" LCD TV will be $150 before anybody buys the first one. That chart isn’t exactly evidence for the proposition that if everybody agrees to wait for a lower price that prices will fall.
But then, knowing I paid the absolute minimum for something is not what gives me joy in my purchases (but I assume that is what motivates the people who will stand in a 30 minute line to get a free $3 ice cream cone), enjoying my purchases does.
If a ebook isn’t worth it to you at X price, I don’t care. Don’t buy it. But why does it need to be a protest against the evil profit motive? And why am I stupid for having a higher price point for the product than you?
Why do I live in a cardboard box? You’re the one who got defensive and started making it personal, hoss.
But I would be happy to say we simply disagree about whether spending that much on kindle books is a good idea.
Shakester made a very poor argument there. Frankly, most responses to technology critiques that involve the word “luddite” aren’t very examined. (The term, as an insult, itself represents something of a misunderstanding of the original Luddites, but that’s another discussion.)
Absurd and mendacious as televangelists may be, there’s nothing inherently contradictory about using a technology one way to make a critique of the same or similar technology used another way. Nobody is confounded by the notion that books can be used to attack the ideas or effects of other books, right?
Nobody here, even Der Trihs I think, is categorically rejecting the technology of a portable electronic device for storing and reading written material. Obviously everyone here has embraced certain forms of computer technology.
Neil Postman, often derided as a luddite by people who didn’t understand what he was saying, suggested that new technologies be evaluated in light of questions like, “what is the problem to which this technology is the solution?” As noted in the thread, there are some problems to which an e-reader can be a solution. Great! But we might then consider questions such as “whose problem is it?” and “what new problems might be created because we have solved this problem?” All technologies vary considerably in their utility to different people, or to the same people in different contexts. Most technologies are not unalloyed goods.
I don’t really view what I said as personal, or defensive. The argument you presented for why people should not spend that much is, it seems to me, one that would pretty much apply to anything you might purchase. If everybody refused to purchase Campbell’s soup, presumably they’d lower the price as well.
The living in a cardboard box is the reduction to absurdity of it. Since obviously you don’t live naked in a cardboard box eating overripe fruit you find fallen on the ground, the implicit question is why does your analysis apply to electronic books when it doesn’t to other things (or, what am I missing in it that makes electronic books inherently different).
Who says it doesn’t? I don’t mind someone making a reasonable profit off of me, but if the margin starts getting too big, I look for other options.
You don’t mind people profiteering at your expense? Hey that’s your lookout. More power to you. Best of luck to you and yours.