Prices Slashed For Nook, Kindle E-Readers 255
b0bby sends in a report from ZDNet about the sudden outbreak of a price war in e-reader devices. "On Monday, Barnes & Noble cut the price of the 3G Nook to $199. It also launched a $149 Wi-Fi version. Just hours later, Amazon responded by cutting the price of the Kindle to $189. At $259, the price of the Kindle and Nook just 24 hours ago, an e-reader purchase competed with an Apple iPad, which started at $499 for a Wi-Fi version. Below $200, a dedicated e-reader purchase makes a lot more sense." Sony dropped prices for its readers three months ago, but the move didn't kick off a price war at that time. Some believe that dedicated e-readers are doomed in the long run to lose out to general-purpose devices such as the iPad — and its coming imitators, many of which will be based on Google Android.
Re:e readers are insanely overpriced (Score:1, Interesting)
The e-ink screens that ereaders use cost about $75-90, even in bulk. By dropping prices down to ~$150, they're cutting their margins pretty thin in order to gain marketshare.
My prediction (Score:2, Interesting)
Forrester projected that the $150 price point would jump start e-reader sales.
And I predict a $49.99 will make them take off like a rocket!
Now if only there was a price war with content.
I think subtracting the printing and distribution costs of a printed version from a dead tree version of a book would be a fair price for econtent - the publisher makes their money, the author gets the same royalty, and the consumer doesn't feel like their over-paying for content.
Example: $50 paper book - $20 for royalties, advertising, general administrative costs, publisher profit = $30 for printing, paper, trucking of the dead trees. Sell the book for $20 + retailer markup = $28.
I can live with that for the same content. Now if they'd allow for that content to be transferred easily ..... yeah, dream on. I guess if someone want's to borrow a book on the eReader, you would have to lend them the entire reader. That sucks!
Re:Neglect the benefits & tablets win... (Score:5, Interesting)
iPad meh... I've been reading books like a fiend over the past year with my iPod touch. It's readable outside without a problem (with sunglasses), it's small so my puny nerd arms don't get tired, fits in a pocket, supports Kindle software, as well as numerous others (I recommend Stanza - vertical swipe -> brightness adjustment).
Battery life of maybe a day without charging, but I can live with that.
The lock in is more important (Score:3, Interesting)
When you entice people to make a significant investment in your platform (via books with your proprietary DRM system - the nook uses ePUBs, but it's wrapped with their own DRM) so switching means throwing all of the books they bought away, you'll have them buying your device (and more importantly, the books) for years to come.
Some people would argue that you argue that you only read books once, but some people watch movies, read books, etc. multiple times.
Planning on using an Evo or Droid X instead (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The lock in is more important (Score:3, Interesting)
What Apple did was invert the normal rules by being first to market with a credible MP3 player and leveraging their extremely loyal base. It was a beautifully executed coup, but not one that Amazon or B&N are in a position to duplicate. They gave it a go, but now they're having to fall back on the tried and true Gillette model.
Re:Neglect the benefits & tablets win... (Score:1, Interesting)
When making a comparison, how can you ignore the ONLY benefits of the e-reader (e-ink, battery life, and the free data on some models)? Tablets win for the same thing that all superior products win: for anyone looking for MORE than a decent platform for reading text, e-readers suck. If that's all you want to do, that's great, enjoy your e-reader. The price cuts certainly help. The problem is that there are *so many* disadvantages to an e-reader that you're neglecting, along with a complementary list of advantages for tablets.
Of your four "advantages", two are restatements of each other (battery life is a function of power draw) and one is highly subjective at best ("easier on the eyes"). The fact is that e-ink isn't realistically any easier on the eyes unless you're comparing e-ink in a fully lit room with an LCD on full brightness in a totally dark room. One could even argue that your fourth reason is also subjective: the sparkly/glittery effect of the e-ink screen and the relative low contrast between the green background and the charcoal text has been known to annoy people, too.
Then there are the disadvantages: page flips are slow and clumsy, artwork is terrible unless it's line art, there's no color (and the color e-ink prototypes aren't going to cut it, either), there's essentially no interaction other than scrolling, it has limited/no multimedia capabilities, and it is, in the words of Alton Brown, a unitasker of the first degree.
Compare a tablet, with a full range of information, Internet, multimedia, gaming, productivity, communication, and reading applications. Tablets done right have screens with good color, viewing angles, and contrast, and highly responsive multitouch interfaces. Battery life north of 10 hours is enough so as to make no difference to most people--they can use it all day, drop it into a charger at night, and use it all day again. The reading applications aren't limited to text, but fully-featured magazines, comic books, illustrated texts, and interactive content, all of which can be used without an external light source with a simple adjustment of background brightness.
People who complain about "headaches" when using an LCD are just doing so in an environment with insufficient ambient light, which e-readers only avoid because they're illegible without sufficient ambient light. Whining about staring into a "lightbulb" is only based on poor ergonomic choices that they've made themselves. There is no physical difference to the eye whether light is backlit or reflected; turn on a lamp and/or adjust your brightness in low-light conditions and your problems are magically solved.
That said, personal preference is personal preference. If e-ink is the fairy dust cure-all, then it counts against tablets. Does it count enough to give up all the other functionality? That depends on what you're buying it for. But there's little question that more people will find a tablet useful and worthwhile than an e-reader, even at three times the price.
Re:Neglect the benefits & tablets win... (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually own both a Kindle (DX) and an IPod Touch, and can testify that the Kindle is much more eye friendly. Having both is awesome, because my iPod is always in my pocket for quick reading, my Kindle is much more eye and battery friendly for serious reading, and the software keeps both in sync. Well, when I buy kindle books anyway, with other DRM free ebooks that make up most of my collection I have to keep in sync myself, but it's not that hard.
And yes, the iPod touch is barely readable outside in the bright sunlight, but the Kindle is gorgeous, and only gets better the more light falls on it.Even indoors, the kindle is much easier to read.
.
Bottom line: Don't knock the benefits of e-ink until you've used an e-ink device for a few days.
Well you can slap Apple for that crap (Score:2, Interesting)
because they found a new customer, publishers. We are just the frill too line the publisher's pockets. Amazon was doing great with their pricing model yet people still yelped over the "high costs". Well for the time being we will have to look back on their model as the good old days.
I am disappointed that the larger Kindle is still held at its price. That is the one I am most interested in. Can't stand the iPad, totally useless in the sun; as in I like to read outdoors, I don't need another device to make a basement dweller. I compared both, the benefit of having geeks for coworkers and while the iPad has more function in the realm of books the Kindle just is it. One e-ink comes out in color that will remove one of the last complaints people have with it. Well that and the ability to easily annotate entries.
Re:Neglect the benefits & tablets win... (Score:4, Interesting)
I have an iPad, and though I like it pretty well, I have to say that I don't like it for reading books. Part of the reason is the display. It's strange because I'm completely comfortable using it to read long web page articles, but reading a novel on a lit screen rubs me the wrong way.
I have another complaint, though, which is arguable a stupid complaint but it's much harder to solve: I'm too easily distracted. If I'm trying to read a novel and I have a device in my hand that can browse the web, I might just go to one of my favorite websites for a minute or two to see what's going on. If my iPad beeps because I received an email, then I will immediately stop reading to see what email I just received. In short, when I tried reading a novel on my iPad, I couldn't get any reading done.
Now in both of these complaints, there's not really an inherent problem with the iPad. It just doesn't quite work for me. Still, I doubt I'm the only one who would have these complaints. Personally I've gone back to dead-tree distribution for my novels. I might consider a dedicated e-reader if it was cheap enough, and if I weren't concerned about the DRM.
Re:What makes Android tablets "coming"? (Score:2, Interesting)
I think you're full of it, because iOS 4 wasn't available until today. But, on the odd chance that you aren't trolling, what specific features in iOS 4 are missing that you have in Android 2.1?
Re:EBOOK PRICES (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.gutenberg.org/ [gutenberg.org]
Re:It does not matter... (Score:4, Interesting)
A 6" 600x800 screen, as seen in most readers, is simply not high-res enough to read most PDFs in fit-page-to-screen mode - and you can't really go for anything else, as scrolling is very painful with such low screen refresh rates, and PDFs don't reflow. You need something bigger, like Kindle DX, or, better yed, iLiad. iPad also does better largely due to high-resolution (well, and the fact that it can actually scroll them reasonably well).
Re:EBOOK PRICES (Score:4, Interesting)
I won't do so aggressively until prices are reasonable (at $5, I'd go nuts, and their profits would skyrocket; everybody wins.
$5 isn't bad, but given the fact that their manufacturing and distribution costs are essentially $0, I would never buy many ebooks until the price hit $3 or less.....but that's just my opinion. With prices at $5 I'd rather just spend the extra couple bucks and have something physical that I own. As it is with the average price being over $8, it's cheaper to buy paperback books, and that's before you factor in the cost of the device.
I'd love to have an e-book reader, but I'm not buying one until the price (for both the books and the reader) are reasonable. $150 is reasonable for the reader, now they just need to fix the pricing on their books.
Re:e readers are insanely overpriced (Score:3, Interesting)
When everyone says free, they are generally talking about the marginal cost.
The marginal cost of an ebook is practically $0.00. The marginal cost of a $8 paperback is at least $2 (materials and physical movement of the book.)
Taking a popular book as an example:
Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
paperback $7.99
kindle $9.99
So the marginal cost per book goes down and the price goes up. It's easy to see where customers think they're getting gouged when they're paying more for a cheaper copy that is more restrictive (no resell possible).
Re:e readers are insanely overpriced (Score:2, Interesting)
On the other hand, I bought a Sony Reader and I love it. I just don't buy it for books I'll be reading more than once or books where the price difference won't justify a purchase. The reading experience on the Reader is better than a paper book. It lays flat, it can be held in a single hand or not at all. There is no curve to the page. There is no flipping hand positions from left page to right page...etc...
Tons of free books out there have justified the cost for me. I just don't see it going mainstream until the price of books makes sense.
Re:EBOOK PRICES (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:e readers are insanely overpriced (Score:3, Interesting)
There are things where an ebook reader is inferior to real books.
Can you share books with your friends? Can you sell the books (or give some of them for free)? If you have two kids, can they read two different books you bought for your ebook?
There are things the eBook Readers do better than paper books - but not all of them.
How much would it cost you to buy one book? $$ versus $$$
Re:EBOOK PRICES (Score:3, Interesting)
For novels I agree, but I think some technical books are worth more than that. The Art of Electronics is my favourite example. £40 is quite a lot for one book but it's usefulness and the support it gives the authors (hopefully leading to the third edition some day) is IMHO just about acceptable. Just.
Unfortunately technical books don't work well with eInk displays. You need to flick through them quickly, scanning for the information you need. A 2 second delay showing each page doesn't cut it.
Re:Easier on the eyes?!? (Score:3, Interesting)
The Kindle and other eInk displays have a contrast ratio of 6:1 to 7:1. The iPad backlit IPS display is 750:1 to 930:1.
And how does it compare to netbooks, and other tablets?
I mean, I'm confused by this obsession of only comparing the Ipad to e-readers, as if other LCD portable computers didn't exist. I mean, you either want the benefits of e-ink (in which case, the Ipad doesn't count), or you don't (in which case, there was never any point in buying an e-reader compared with LCD devices). Perhaps this means the Ipad doesn't do well compared with other LCD devices, and thus can only compete as being an "e-reader" with LCD.
Re:It does not matter... (Score:3, Interesting)
I assume you haven't heard about ManyBooks.net, where you can find thousands of books you will never need to reflow, because you can download them in the exact format your device makes the best of. Or read it online as a web page. Your choice.
I just went there, and it seems to be mostly fiction. Note that I was specifically talking about technical literature in my post. For fiction, there are many places to buy books in proper formats.
I assume you haven't heard about all the tools (Calibre, chm2pdf...) that allow you to change in seconds the format of most of books to suit your device.
Calibre is great, but it doesn't help you with PDFs. Once again: you need to reflow them to fit the screen, and the format is not properly reflowable by design (because it requires absolutely positioned and sized text runs).
I assume you assume that Adobe garbage about PDF being the right format for e-books
No, I don't. I'd gladly buy technical books in e.g. ePub, or even HTML - problem is, practically no-one is selling them that way (or at least I haven't seen any). Hence the question: if you know of any place that actually sells technical books in any reflowable format, please just give the link to it. Don't preach how PDF is crap etc; I know already. Just give me the way to actually use something different.