E-Book Pricing Up For Grabs
Currently, e-book readers are a hot, “must have” gadget. A lot of the credit for that must go to the Amazon Kindle of course – but there are plenty of other e-book readers to choose from today. However, even with the greatly increased number of readers available, the Kindle is still the leader of the pack – by a long way.
It’s worth remembering that the e-book reader market – as a commercial entity at least – is still relatively new. The sector continues to grow very quickly, but is still in its developmental phase. For example, there is no agreed standard method of formatting e-books within the industry. There does seem to be a tendency among the new e-book readers to opt for the ePub format. The Kindle uses its own proprietary format – for which it has attracted its fair share of criticism in the past.
The logic is as follows: The adoption of a uniform industry standard will allow e-books to be transferred from one reader to another thereby giving customers more freedom of choice when it comes to purchasing e-books. Theoretically, more choice and more purchasing options should be good for customers and tend to lead to reduced prices, it’s easy enough to see the logic. It makes sense.
Amazon can certainly point to their long experience of offering their customers excellent value in the field of reading – for hardback, paperback and e-book versions. Their clearly stated intent of selling Kindle books for $ 9.99 or less has led to some fairly terse discussions with many of the large publishing houses who are, even now, fighting hard to protect the sale of hardback editions.
A recent study, conducted by the New York Times newspaper, examined the average book price for the Kindle, Sony, and the Nook readers. 10 books, 5 non-fiction and 5 fiction, were chosen from the New York Times’ best books list of 2009. It was found that the Kindle books had an average price of $ 13.69, the Sony readers average price per book was $ 15.26 and the Nook had a very much higher average price per book of $ 19.29 per book.
There does not seem to be any evidence that Amazon are using their market leadership position to profiteer. As a matter of fact, using these numbers as a basis, anyone who reads a book a week would save $ 300 per annum by choosing the Kindle instead of the Nook. It would finance itself and you would still have some money left over to buy a few books.
It’s hard to see a scenario where the Amazon Kindle reader winds up as the Betamax of e-books. Advocates of the Sony reader can read into that what they will. For the immediate future, it looks as if the main discussion may need to be held between e-book distributors and the major publishing houses. It will not be until they realise that the world has changed and publishing must change with it, that the way will clear for industry standards to be agreed upon and customer value to be enhanced.
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