eBooks Nearly Outsell Print Books At Amazon 154
destinyland writes "Thursday Amazon.com announced that they're selling more ebooks than paperback books — and three times as many ebooks as hardcovers. If you combine their statistics into a pie chart, it shows that 45% of all the books Amazon sells are now ebooks. And Amazon's statistic doesn't include all the free ebooks people are downloading to their Kindles, so if just one user downloads a free ebook for every nine paid ebook purchases — then Amazon is already delivering more digital ebooks than they are print editions."
Another reader tips an interview with Brian Altounian, CEO of ebook marketplace WOWIO, in which he discusses an encroaching feature that ebook aficionados love to hate: ads.
Same phenomenon as the mobile app market (Score:3)
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This is an expected tra
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OTOH, my wife can get 100's of romance for free.
It varies from book to book.
For example, Jim Butchers publishers are forcing the Dresdan books to be 10 bucks for the kindle version.
That more expensive then the paperback. They are hurting the author and themselves.
Then their are other books I can get for 4.99. The industry hasn't settled down.
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They are explicitly not; maybe less suspicion and more fact checking next time?
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Give the guy a break, he's just acting like a journalist.
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Hah!
It just irks me sometimes that people, supposed "Information Age," can't even be bothered to read the things sourced in the link before they wander off into hypothetical-town.
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Hell, most new hardback books are cheaper than their ebook equivalents. It's utterly ridiculous, given the minimal amount of resources involved in producing an ebook. I own a Nook and am very happy with it. I've yet to be disappointed in the ebook prices from any of the major distributors however. It's a good thing that there are plenty of freely available public domain books out there to read through. My library selection in Calibre will keep me reading for a few years at least. ;)
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One thing to keep in mind: there aren't minimal resources required, because most of the cost of publishing a book isn't the physical manufacturing/shipping/etc; it's edition, author advances, advertising, and other processes that wouldn't disappear even if the book was exclusively digital. Granted, most books aren't - which means that these costs are spread across both physical and e-Book sales, not that e-Book copies somehow cost nothing to make. Additionally, depending on the publication process and eBo
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I think he was talking about the resources to make anot
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Maybe, but I don't think it's clear which he's referring to. When I think "producing an eBook," I don't think "just the physical part of the chain." If so, though, my objection is pretty much withdrawn.
And replaced, unfortunately - printing more copies of a physical book that's already published can be a MUCH cheaper process th
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That being said, eBook prices are still unreasonable, and they ARE competing with a lot of compelling free material.
And yet they're selling remarkably well. It seems the market has decided that the convenience is worth both the cost of the initial investment and the regular "print" cost for the books.
I would guess, given the numbers, that a sizable portion of the book market doesn't care about owning a physical book; they're more interested in just reading the text.
It's also possible that a large number of readers find the physical book 'inconvenient' after they've read it -- if they don't want to just toss it in the bi
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They are selling remarkably well to hardcore book enthusiasts - eBook owners are still a minority. My hope is that when readers hit $80 and books hit $6 or so, we'll actually see them as a driver of mainstream adoption.
Also, tons of people read out of copyright stuff - Austen, Shakespeare, etc, are really, really popular. They don't tend to make up the entirety of most people's reading material, but it's not an uncompelling set of books - and as copyright creeps over the mid 1900s, it's just going to get
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If anything, e-books outselling paper backs at the world's biggest book seller shows that they are now mainstream.
I buy perhaps too many e-books from Amazon. But even then, the "send sample" feature has allowed me to stop buying books by impulse. Now I always ask for samples. Always. When I finish the sample, I buy the book.
For me the biggest drawback at Amazon is the lack of non English books.
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And if you turn-around and sell the Used book to somebody else for ~$3.00, then you've really only paid 68 cents.
Kindle - $8.09
Used - 0.68
Wow that is a bargain. Over 90% off the kindle price. If you read $1000 worth of books each year, you'll save over $900 buying used instead, and then selling it back via amazon's marketplace.
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This is so true, but in practice I'm selling books on eBay for 0.99 and charging a postage rate of three times what the book is worth just to break even. That's because the postage rate for books is murder...
Why eBooks aren't priced to reflect the lack of paper, shipping and bulk is beyond me.
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You can ship books via media mail at $3.24 or if the book is light, first class for $2. Plus whatever delivery confirmation costs.
Re:Same phenomenon as the mobile app market (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, amazon caved into the demands of the large publishers and is now allowing publishers to set prices. Naturally, the publishers have started to test having ebook prices of popular new releases actually be $1-2 higher than the equivalent hardcover and after the release has been out awhile reduce the ebook price to be just the same as paperback. So, in effect we move from the situation a year ago where kindle readers were receiving a discount on books and publishers could complain that the future of publishing was in peril - we now have a situation where kindle readers are being pushed as an extra money maker - kindle readers are paying a premium for fast access to books above and beyond the cost of the kindle itself. Somewhat of an interesting situation where if a kindle owner has an amazon prime account, he is actually paying amazon extra not to kill a tree and burn additional energy to send him the physical copy.
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I think it's unfortunate that they're starting out more than hardcover books, but before, were ebooks dropping in price at all?
Just like with video games (wait for Greatest Hits editions, general price lowering, or buying on eBay), movies (wait for netflix), generally I don't care that I 'had' to wait since there was plenty of other media to consume in the meantime. (The only exceptions to 'generally' I can think of are a few books I specifically buy hardcover, and those are sometimes remaindered books.)
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Don't blame Amazon, blame Apple (Score:2)
Whose deals caused prices to jump. Amazon was left with allowing Apple access to books they would not have or going along with it.
http://www.fictionmatters.com/2010/02/01/amazon-flanks-the-first-battle-of-the-ebook-wars/ [fictionmatters.com]
Is one story, but as you read others it becomes more clear. Amazon was more than happy with its 9.99 structure but publishers were looking at the iPad cash cow and Apple was willing to cut them better deals. So Amazon moved first and yes prices went up but it secured them the numbers and
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Actually, that's what Amazon wants you to believe about it. The reality was somewhat different.
The thing you have to understand is that for a major publisher, the actual production cost of a book is a very minor cost. Most of the cost of getting that book ready is editing, typesetting (even for an e-book), cover design (also even for an e-book) and marketing. And, e-books represent around 10% of trade fiction sales, give or take, so they bring in less money overall.
What Amazon was doing was trying to for
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. It's not all unknown authors too. Sometimes an author will plan a trilogy and make the first volume available free so that he will interest you in buying the other volumes. Sometimes a publisher Baen Free [baen.com]
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I will accept ads (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I will accept ads (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I will accept ads (Score:5, Funny)
The answer is of course, product placement in-line with the text. They could do this pretty easily on the back end of many books automatically.
"... all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as he opened forth his Pepsi-Cola, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it."
Re:I will accept ads (Score:4, Insightful)
And I'll never buy another eBook the first time I see an ad in one. We balance out. Books are about immersion, and having ads will ruin it for me.
It seems like it depends critically on the presentation and content of the ads.
Many (physical) paperbacks I buy have little fall-out inserts advertising other releases by the same publisher, book clubs, etc. I don't mind these -- I glance them, sometimes read them, usually toss them out (though the mini-catalogues of other books are actually useful enough to keep in some cases). They're easily ignored, not in my face, often informative, and topical.
Ebook adverts with these same properties wouldn't be too objectionable I think.
OTOH, I imagine the likelihood of ebook publishers not screwing it up is very low -- there's this weird idea amongst publishing entities (not just books but movies, music, etc) that any change of medium means that all the rules change, that any and all conventions and lessons learned from the old medium should be tossed out, and that the new medium is carte blanche to viciously ream the consumer while bleeding him dry.
One would hope that consumers (and regulators, where appropriate) would disabuse publishers of this notion...
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You'd be surprised at how much it takes to break you out of inmersion. Try reading a short story online sometime, 99% of them have ads left and right but one is easily able to follow the narrative without ever taking a second look at them.
Kinda like the rest of the web, actually.
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I don't know man, sometimes I find dropping $0 on a book isn't justified.
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Keep in mind (Score:5, Insightful)
That Amazon does not represent the entire book market - they sell to a subset of customers that don't mind getting their books online. The fact that a significant portion of those customers are equally happy with ebooks isn't exactly a revelation. There are still a lot of people out there who prefer to buy real books, whether or not the big bookstores are catering to them.
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um, Amazon caters to all story lovers, whether it's print or electronic. It sells a huge base of books in a wide swath if genres.
Like it or not, it's a strong market indicator
Yes, there will always be book lovers. People who think the value in reading is the number books on their shelves.
I pity them.
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Well, when Amazon decides to delete a book you aren't supposed to have, the people with the physical copy will still have it.
They've done it before, I have no doubt they'll do it again at some point.
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Well, when Amazon decides to delete a book you aren't supposed to have, the people with the physical copy will still have it.
They've done it before, I have no doubt they'll do it again at some point.
Unless you have stolen the book, there is no such thing as "a book you aren't supposed to have".
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is that why i see tons of kindles everywhere i go?
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They should purchase the newest version of the kindle, it's lighter.
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I love my second gen, but looking at the third gen, I have to say - getting rid of the goddamned stick has to be almost worth the price of admission all on its own. Seriously, I can't count the number of accidental deletions that thing has caused.
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There are still a lot of people out there who prefer to buy real books, whether or not the big bookstores are catering to them.
But you have totally hand waived the story away!?!
Similar results are shown by Barnes and Noble [itworld.com], which actually has more titles than Amazon.
Ebooks are already nearly outselling Dead Tree Books, and the trend is only getting started. Ereader penetration is far from being mainstream. Yet the most avid readers seem to be adopting the devices at an astounding rate.
Borders and Books-a-Million have also added eReaders. Its not a trend you can dismiss lightly. Just as the family photos have disappeared from the
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Not to mention that they are the primary source for Kindle books. My mom gave my dad a kindle last year, so he started using Amazon to buy all his e-books instead of getting print books from the local Barnes & Noble.
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If you're reading primarily Gutenberg and other open documents, there's not really a practical difference there (a principle difference is fine, of course). Their 1984 moment (which was forced by the publisher, legally the correct action, and reversed basically immediately) wouldn't have affected your Gutenberg books, because you don't buy them through Amazon, and their recall only applies to books with their DRM.
Again, if it's just "Amazon were dicks, yo," 100% with you there. Although, given that e-Book
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I have a NOOKcolor (and had a wifi Nook before that). Like you, I waited until the prices dropped a bit on the readers before I purchased one. I sold my wifi Nook when I got my NOOKcolor. eBooks are great for a lot of genres, but I still buy a hardcopy book from time to time. I prefer hardcopy cookbooks and I prefer getting magazines in electronic format.
Sure, you can not really loan an ebook, however, I rarely ever loaned any of my hardcopy books, so that's not a big loss for me (many of my friends are
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Amazon is problematic, in fact, because among other things, they don't release their actual sales figures. This means that their claims are very difficult, if not impossible to verify. According to the trade book publishers themselves, as of October 2010, e-book sales represented 8.7% of their net for 2010 (up from 3.31% in 2009 - the full figures for 2010 aren't out yet, though).
As far as what is going on in the actual e-book market vs. the print book market, it is important to note that while the produc
Sure, This Month... (Score:2)
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I'm not sure that it's really a big loss that these are not available on Kindle. I've tried using a textbook on mine and it just isn't particularly useful; flicking from page to page looking at quick bits of information just isn't the use-case that the Kindle works well for. There's no way I could justify paying the price of a textbook to get one on Kindle.
On the other hand, the ability to search is quite handy and the weight of the Kindle is a massive advantage. This is actually one scenario where the user
No ads (Score:3)
Putting ads in ebooks would totally kill my interest in buying ebooks - and I'm a Kindle owner. If they start putting ads in there, I will sell my Kindle on eBay. I suspect inserting ads would kill the nascent ebook market.
It's not like eBooks are a new product - they're just a repackaged offering of a product that's been sold for years and years. I've got lots of paper books, and they don't contain ads... with the exception of occasionally hawking another title by the same author.
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If the books I want to read for free, and the included a small ad at the beginning of every chapter, I wouldn't mind.
Hell, it could be an ad holder page that gets update with adds every 6 months.
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Hmmm, PTerry (one of the biggest individual sellers in the English language market for the last couple of decades) would be most unpopular. Most (not all, but most) of his books more-or-less completely eschew the "chapter" paradigm.
Now, just what makes you think that an e-book reader would have a wireless connectio
How things have changed (Score:2)
In the days of Kenneth Starr [wikimedia.org] and the Monika Lewinski "The Skank Kept The Nasty Dress" Investigation, people were livid and up-in-arms when Lewinsky's book-purchasing records were sought [wikimedia.org].
Now all you need to do is give Amazon a few pennies and call yourself an "advertiser".
How times have changed.
This is a tragedy. (Score:2)
The money spent on ebooks should be donated to libraries to buy those exact same ebooks. The books could then be shared.
It is a tragedy that this is not happening.
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yes, because both those things can't happen together~
Sheesh.
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The money spent on ebooks should be donated to libraries to buy those exact same ebooks. The books could then be shared.
It is a tragedy that this is not happening.
What possible justification could there be for depriving an author of their money in order to donate to libraries? Even fewer sales over all because you insist they stock the libraries with their sales revenue?
Re:This is a tragedy. (Score:4, Insightful)
Every single thing you said is false in the digital world.
Its not a common place for people to learn. Library patronage is falling fast.
Its no longer needed for a literate society. We have thousands of book stores, the Internet, and millions of totally free ebooks.
Finding new authors? ---> Google.
Enhances sales? Suppresses sales you mean.
And libraries deprive authors of thousands of royalties.
So wrong on 100% of your points. A case can be made that libraries in the digital age serve precisely one purpose, and that is to assure continued availability of works unpopular with the State or the Church or the general times.
Its an unpopular view, but never the less, libraries have largely outlived their general usefulness.
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Actually, nothing he said is false, and also, library patronage is seeing a rise lately. FUNDING is falling, true; but libraries serve a variety of social functions, serve as the main driver for many literacy programs, facilitate research in any number of areas, and, oh yeah, generate royalties through book purchasing.
And the "libraries hurt authors" chestnut has been stupid since roughly the 1800s. If you can't bother to do enough reading to debunk that crap, I can't be bothered to hold your hand through i
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If I can borrow a book for free from a library, why would I buy it?
If nobody buys the books, what is the incentive for someone to write one?
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Most books that I buy are purchased after I've already finished reading the book.
I buy books that I've decided that I want to have handy as references or that I want to be able to loan out to friends and family.
So based on my own habits and the fact that most avid book buyers I know have similar habits, I would expect that having a book in a library would do much to increase the sales of that book.
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Close the libraries and use the money to subsidize the purchase of readers for a town's residents and school children. The next itteration of basic eBooks will most likely drop below $100. Once that happens print sales will be decimated.
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So, how does this argument not apply to paper books? In fact, it's actually a better argument for paper books, because most libraries have long practice in being very convenient to borrow paper books from, whereas most eBook lending programs aren't very convenient at all; usually they're so rights-encumbered that they give up most of the advantages of being digital copies.
I'm a grad student for Library and Information Science, in my last semester. While it's great when people contribute to libraries, it's
Percentages do not exist without pie charts (Score:3)
Interesting, it seems that nowadays we suddenly first have to put numbers into a pie chart, before we can see what percentage it has. This seems like primary school knowledge to me.
May be selling lots of ebooks, not lots of Kindles (Score:3)
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But wasn't Kindle always just a vehicle to drive more book sales? It seems to be the strategy for both Amazon and B&N so far. That's why they're priced lower than other readers.
Replace those record albums with CDs! (Score:3)
Is this real?
A manipulation from Amazon would be nothing new, and this one costs them nothing and has the potential to create a profitable trend. Those Jonses and their Kindles.
But whatever. Let's take it at face value. . .
All those people who got an iPad thingy for Christmas are eager to try it out and never ever get bored with their cool new Buzz Lightyear.
So yeah, they're going to buy media, because that's the whole premise of the device. You don't get a Buzz Lightyear and *not* click his wings open a bunch of times.
And the same way everybody had to replace their album collections with CDs, there is a market spike as new media is adopted.
The question is. . . Will it stick, or is this just another digital watch?
Well, let's consider. . , all those iPads were bought at around the same time. But their batteries will wear out according to usage, and when your digital book stops holding a charge for long enough. . , do you replace it? Was the experience good enough for you? Can you port all your purchased 'books' over to a new reader easily? Do you have to stay brand-loyal just to read your stuff? Will there be law-suits forcing personal library porting because Apple is the new anti-competitive demon? Will people even care? (Do you still have all the same crap you downloaded from Napster or have you moved on, secure in the knowledge that all that old music is basically free any time you want it? Or are you willing to pay a buck to play it on your iPod?)
Will owning an eReader of some sort be like owning a car? Or a phone? Considered a basic necessity just so you can access your stuff?
Maybe.
I think eReaders are probably here to stay, and they will probably be a viable income source for publishers, but I wouldn't let all that limelight blind you. Paper ain't going away. It's just going to have to share.
Remember: Theater never died. There's a half dozen full stages within a ten minute walk from my place, and they're all booked regularly.
-FL
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Jeezus. A little benefit of the doubt before hitting "Sumbit" would be nice. Rash assumptions make you look rather sanctimonious.
I don't own a car or a cell phone.
I was speaking to broad cultural trends in the West, where, if you'll notice, this story was produced by and for. It's about eBooks, for goodness sake. I think those consumers are going to be car and phone people, don't you?
-FL
licensing, not buying (Score:5, Informative)
You are licensing the eBook. Not buying it.
Amazon recalls (and embodies) Orwell's '1984' [cnet.com]
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What kind of licence gives you your money back after you're done with it?
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You are licensing the eBook. Not buying it.
What you say is true, and still many people (including me) are only buying e-books.
There is more to e-books & paper books, than the licensing difference. The impression I get at slashdot is that most people bashing e-books have never used an e-book, or are not old enough to understand the 'costs' associated with a large library.
I can only speak for myself but:
What I haven't seen (Score:2)
... is someone coming out of a restroom stall with a kindle or an iPad. Over the decades, I've seen plenty of people taking hard copies of books to the toilet.
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Nice thing about eBooks is they are not tied to a single device. I start one on my tablet, read a bit more on my PC, and some more on my iPhone. My spot in the book is always up to date, I can pull it up on any device I want and continue right where I left off.
So not "Seeing" the Kindle or iPad coming out of a restroom stall, doesn't mean they weren't reading an eBook in there.
ads without DRM? (Score:2)
The WOWIO interview left me with a lot of questions, and those weren't cleared up by the very brief info [wowio.com] on wowio's web site. As far as I can tell, they sell DRM-free books with ads in them, give 100% of the purchase price to the author, and keep 100% of the ad revenue for themselves. What I don't quite understand about this is what's stopping someone from writing software that simply strips the ads out of a WOWIO book. There's also the question of what WOWIO sees as the service they provide to authors and/
E-Calibre? (Score:3, Interesting)
EBooks have a drastically lower value (Score:2)
I have (and often reread - Larry Niven and RAH titles most recently) hundreds of books that I bought more than 30 years ago, dozens bought by my parents 50 years ago, and a few that my grandparents passed down from before that - does anybody think that Amazon DRM will still be maintained in even 20 years? How's that Plays-For-Sure working for you?
So I would probably buy eBooks for "rental" type fees, but no more
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I just can't get past how tremendously short-sighted it is to buy an eBook at current rates. does anybody think that Amazon DRM will still be maintained in even 20 years? (And stripping the DRM doesn't count, since nobody around here does anything that's illegal!)
It may be illegal in US, but not elsewhere. And even in US it's one of those "illegal but who cares?" kinds of things. But it kills your short-sightedness argument right on the spot.
Oh, and you do realize that Amazon isn't the only one selling ebooks, right? And that you can buy them without DRM elsewhere?
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I just can't get past how tremendously short-sighted it is to buy an eBook at current rates.
It depends on your reading style.
Some people buy a novel, read it, then give it to a charity shop. For them, only the last step is lost -- now certainly that warm and fuzzy feeling counts for someone, and the life of the book after donation is significant in the wider scheme of things, but for the original buyer it's not a hugely degraded experience, which might be compensated by the convenience of reading on an ebook platform.
Or, there's technical titles -- O'Reilly books and the like -- which are obsolet
Quite the User (Score:2)
"...so if just one user downloads a free ebook for every nine paid ebook purchases — then Amazon is already delivering more digital ebooks than they are print editions."
That one user must be downloading a huge number of free ebooks.
Re:Kindle owner (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as the Kindle has the ability to remotely delete books, they can go fuck themself.
Re:the ebook ripoff (Score:5, Informative)
As a result, prices skyrocketed nearly overnight. The last 4 or 5 books I have been interested in buying have been more expensive as ebooks than in hardover or paperback form. So yes, it is a complete ripoff. Especially since you don't really own the ebooks you purchase and cannot lend them easily or sell them.
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I've had the opposite experience... all of the eBooks I've purchased have been less than the hardback version. I've not checked the paperback prices on all of them (some were not available in paperback) and generally the eBook price was comparable. In the few instances where the price was slightly higher, the convenience of an eBook offset the slightly higher price.
I buy a few books a month, just what I can read in the time that I have. I am pretty sure that I spend less on books than most people spend o
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Well the argument is (I don't totally believe it myself) that the actual printing and distribution of paper books is so cheap these days that it makes up only a small percentage of the costs.
The cost of editing, ebook creation, and Author's Royalties account for the price of an Ebook. The difference in price between a hard cover (or paperback) and an ebook is the printing and distributional costs.
Take any popular book such as Steven Kings "Under the Dome" [barnesandnoble.com] and compare prices. Ebook 10, Paperback 12, Hardco
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Take any popular book such as Steven Kings "Under the Dome" [barnesandnoble.com] and compare prices. Ebook 10, Paperback 12, Hardcover 20).
Check out a current bestseller, "Fall of Giants" by Ken Follet. [barnesandnoble.com] It's more expensive as an ebook than in hardcover!
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I addressed this above.
This is strictly a temporal imbalance due to the way paper books are marketed when the the work is a new AND a best seller. Somebody has to pay for all that travel to book signings, the speaking engagements, etc.
After the hype wears down, the price straightens out.
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Behold a $12.99 ebook of a novel written in 1968: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/True-Grit/Charles-Portis/e/9781590206508/?itm=4&USRI=true+grit [barnesandnoble.com]
Note the paperback is $7.93. No one has to pay for Charles Portis' book signings or speaking engangements. I fail to see why ebook prices should be above paper book prices any time they might be popular. Should that be the selling point of ebook readers? That you can
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True enough, New is not always necessary.
In this case the movie is certainly driving the hype. This book was out of print for 20 years and this edition was released only because of the potential for movie driven sales. So in a way it is still New, as it was published on November 2010.
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Welcome to America.
You will find it different here than the jungle hut you used to live in. Here people do things for money. Since you work for free, you might not notice this. But don't tell Charles Portis he is ripping you off by selling you a book. (Yes, he's still alive and collecting royalties).
One might ask why there was even a remake of True Grit. Must be just a clear rip off.
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One might ask why there was even a remake of True Grit. Must be just a clear rip off.
I'm sure if they came out with a new vhs version of the original True Grit that was three times as expensive as the blueray, you'd defend that as a "temporal imbalance" due to marketing as well. God forbid anyone criticize a ridiculous price structure.
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The paperback's discounted heavily - its list price is $14.95.
That being said, prices need to come down - I think something in the #12-16 range for new releases, fading to two dollars under paperback price.
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Am i the only one who finds ebooks to be a complete ripoff? I received a kindle for christmas and was completely floored by the fact that most amazon ebooks are $10+! I can go to a half price books and get the book in paperback and sometimes hard back for the same cost or less in most cases. The fact that I'm expected to pay the same for a product with zero manufacuturing costs as a physical "it's mine" copy is outlandish.
Can you carry 1000 books in your pocket?
You're paying for other things when you buy a Kindle book - mostly, convenience. You can carry many books at once and access them from anywhere, even without the Kindle device present (they have a PC/Android/iOS app that syncs your library and last read page).
If the Kindle were cheaper, I may even be willing to pay *extra* for books. I've got several books I'm reading right now and I hate having them all over the place.
You also get books instantly. You can get books f
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Err, I was looking at the wrong item - there is no paperback, that was an MP3 Audiobook price. Everything else is fine.
Re:the ebook ripoff (Score:5, Interesting)
Welcome to capitalism.
Buy things you think are worth the price, don't buy things you don't. The market will respond.
As for me, I agree with you 100% and I've been a Kindle owner for years now. This has lead me down the path of trying new Authors who are trying to build a name for themselves. They do it by offering lower priced books, or even giving away the first book in a series.
It's been great!
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However, I don't want to lose my library when the reader breaks or the publisher flips the kill switch. I will keep my hardcopies until ebooks are sold in, say, an unobfuscated XML format. (In fact, ebooks might finally provide a justifiable reason for XML to exist!)
A good reason to strip the DRM off your ebooks - as is recalling what happened to the music libraries of people when their preferred vendor (e.g. Walmart) decided to exit the digital music business.
When I purchase a Kindle book, the first thing I do is strip the DRM off, then copy the file over to the same hard drive my ripped (purchased!) DVDs are on. That drive gets backed up regularly, so I figure I'm covered. The only downside is certain formats - like the "Topaz" format Amazon uses for a minority of bo
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XML is overkill for books. Its a case of the only tool you have being a hammer causing you to look at every problem as if it were a nail.
A simple text file is all that you need. An epub is not much more than a packaged web page.
In any event none of these survive a hard drive crash. Hang on to your hard copy books.
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It's all over the board, from free(a lot of romance) to 10 bucks like The Dresden Files.
It's hard to find a generic average that will have any meaning what so ever.
And yes, it's very believable. It turns out something I have been saying for years is true. Most readers don't use the books on their shelfs as some kind of score card. Kindle is a light weight reader that's extremely convenient and handy.
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Define Average.
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I can't speak for industry averages, but in 2010 my average e-book price was $8. I calculated out how much it would be for cheapest new versions in paper; ignoring shipping costs, it was about $13. I bought 87 books last year, IIRC. 87*$5 gives you the approximate amount of money I saved by buying e-books. It is quite significant, and actually 2010 was the worst year ever. 2008 e-book prices were more than $1 lower and all told I believe the savings were well over $700 (not including books I got for fr
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in a drm free/strippable format
DRM is fairly easy to strip off Kindle books.