On the Economics of the Kindle 398
perlow writes "Just how many books a year would you need to read before the cost of Amazon's Kindle is justified? The answer is not so cut-and-dried. If you're a college student and all of your texts were available on Kindle (possible but unlikely), you could recover the cost of the reader in a semester and a half. For consumers to break even with Kindle's cost in that time, they would have to be in the habit of buying and reading four new hardback books per month — if the convenience factor wasn't part of the equation. At two books per month, breakeven would be in three years." Here is the spreadsheet if you want to play with the numbers.
Re:I'll stick to books (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not about to buy one; but the Kindle's screen is one of its major selling points over various other cheaper and/or more versatile electronic reading widgets.
Re:Color is hard to do (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently you missed the part where the Kindle uses an E-paper [wikipedia.org] display, so it uses power only to change the display, doesn't have a backlight, and is sunlight readable.
A color version would have 1/3 the resolution, if they were able to make red, green, and blue versions of the pixels in the current display.
In general, sunlight readable displays could chew much less power than normal displays if you can turn off the backlight, like in the OLPC XO-1.
Re:i like the idea of the kindle (Score:4, Informative)
Like the irex iliad [irextechnologies.com]..
Open source; drm-free; supports non propietary formats including pdf, text, html, mobi, etc..
It's not perfect but it's a joy to use. Check out the thought that's gone into the (physical) user interface. A conveniently-placed flip-bar vaguely mimics the action of turning a page in a dead-tree book. Has a built-in wacom tablet so you can point, annotate. Has wifi allowing downloading of updates and books from their servers or from a share at some ip address you specify. Should you find some vast source of drm-free books (one example of which is project gutenberg [gutenberg.org]) the hardware (which incidentally has a great look, feel and somewhat bizarrely, smell) may be your last book-related expense!
Disclaimer: I own one so am biased.
Re:Color is hard to do (Score:3, Informative)
actually you would have 1/4 the resolution .. cyan, magenta, yellow and black and at that, you would need quite a high resolution to make it blend properly to provide a good color gamut -- much more difficult than a simple black and white display.
Re:i like the idea of the kindle (Score:3, Informative)
Get on an airplane sometime. I travel frequently (50k miles a year, on average) and see Kindles and the competing Sony product all the time.
On a recent flight, I could see 4 electronic book readers from my seat alone (passenger next to me, passenger across the isle, and two in the row in front of me). Travelers like them because it's easier to bring along a few books on a Kindle than it is to stuff them into their carry-on. Heaven knows I've got enough junk in my bag without trying to bring along a few books too. A Kindle (if I were an avid reader) would fit the bill perfectly.
Re:Color is hard to do (Score:3, Informative)
You're mistaken, all displays use RGB.
A monitor is originally black, so to get colors light has to be emitted. Colors add up, with R+G+B resulting in white.
A sheet of paper is originally white, to get colors you have to absorb some of them. Cyan for instance reflects blue and green, and absorbs red. C+M+Y in theory should equal black, but in reality doesn't, so printers have an extra black color.
Re:i like the idea of the kindle (Score:5, Informative)
"Scratch that - education is too profitable an industry to risk modernizing"
It's a bit more complicated than that.
Let me preface my comments with this: first, I own a small publishing company that among other things, publishes a textbook (at $32.95 US). Second, there are a lot of academic books that are overpriced, and in some cases absolute rip-offs. There is even a company that will remain nameless whose prices have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with reality, and which has absolutely no issues whatsoever with charging $100 for a book that shouldn't be reselling for more than $60.
That being said, modernizing the textbook industry probably wouldn't work at this point in time. And that has nothing to do with the companies - it has to do with the students. They generally prefer a printed book.
I know this because the textbook in question was one I helped write, and we tested it as a free e-book in the class it was written for. At the end of the class, we asked for feedback on the textbook so that we could do some fine-tuning. The comment we got more often than all of the others combined was a complaint that it wasn't a printed book. Keep in mind that these were university students, and we GAVE them the e-book. Not so much as a cent changed hands.
For all the strengths of the e-book, people have to first want to buy it. And when you're looking for something that you can write notes in, an e-book generally won't fit the bill. For that matter, it's a lot easier to deal with a book printed on actual paper than an electronic copy, and that isn't likely to change any time soon. So long as the e-book adds barriers to entry rather than taking them away - and since an e-book requires a reader, electricity, and has to deal with file formats, those barriers aren't going away - the printed book will remain the standard.
Re:i like the idea of the kindle (Score:3, Informative)
The problem with that idea is that textbooks are too profitable an industry to risk modernizing.
Not at all, I've worked in publishing, it's a very very low margin area. The reason it's a low margin area? Because printing costs an absolute fortune, especially when you're publishing text books that not many (yes, 50% the school students in the country counts as not many) people will actually buy. A device on which text books could be read, and which the format of became vaguely standardised in schools would be an absolute boon for publishers.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:i like the idea of the kindle (Score:3, Informative)
Exactly. My wife and I save THOUSANDS a year by buying used textbooks instead of new, her last textbook was $580 new I got it for $190 on amazon.com. If a school went to e-texts and e-readers then our education costs do not go up by the cost of the reader , it will go up by thousands of dollars because I can no longer get used textbooks.
and there are zero chances of them allowing people to sell their used e-book files.
The other side it would allow the textbook writers to rewite the book every semester forcing you to buy the new one that is not available used. This is the holy grail for them and when they get wind of it they will do everything they can to put it in place with the veil of "progress and technology" to hide them laughing and wringing their hands.
Re:i like the idea of the kindle (Score:3, Informative)
One thing this article failed to take into account is the ability to "recycle" books.
When you buy a Kindle book you can't resell it to somebody else because resale of e-texts is blocked. But when you buy an old-fashioned paperback, you can sell it to anybody you desire. I often buy new paperbacks for $6, read them, then sell them as "flawless/like-new" condition for $5 or even $6. In essence I'm renting the books at an average 50 cents each.
So for the cost of a Kindle I can "rent" about 800 paperback novels, which makes amazon's e-reader an unattractive option for me. (It would take me about ten years to read that many paperbacks.)