Read more.Website wants to keep e-books cheap and cheerful.
Read more.Website wants to keep e-books cheap and cheerful.
I'm fairly disappointed with the ebook situation in general really. I was desperately tempted to buy a Kindle, but as a history student it's absolutely no use to me.
Of the texts I've needed to buy, only one has been available on Kindle. And that single book was a whole 20p cheaper than the paperback (brand new). Are they honestly trying to tell me that raw materials, machinery, labour, factory space, multiple deliveries comes to a total of 20p? It's ridiculous.
If I wanted to read the Times every morning, and download every Dan Brown book to my e-reader within 8 seconds of it being released, then yeah, I'd have bought one buy now. But there are so many situations where it doesn't match up to expectations it's untrue.
There's a lot of money out there, I believe, for publishers if they take the right attitude to digital sales. The music industry is almost certainly benefitting, so why are they so backwards? If they start going down routes like this, things can only get worse.
I have so far read 2 books on kindle for android and while I enjoyed the books thoroughly there were a lot of typos and formatting problems.
Charging the same amount as you would pay for a hardcopy which, as stated previously must cost a lot more to produce and supply seems really daft to me.
Raw materials and the like are a fairly small component of the cost of a book. Most of the others are components paid for pretty solely by the retailer, and in the case of a warehouse retailer like Amazon, most of that is significantly diminished as well.
Strippable paperbacks are a rather interesting contrast, those small flappy books, poor binding that fun stuff. If the retailer in question doesn't sell those book in their release window, they don't get shipped back to the distributor or publisher. They just send back the cover, and destroy the rest. And get the full wholesale refund for it.
Now for history books, you are simply paying primarily for the interpretation, the same as other textbooks. So when you remove the physical component of the book, it doesn't really reduce the cost that much.
Even Amazon posting it to the customer is likely to cost around that much, I suspect. And no matter how much bulk you do, all of that automation costs money.
I think you've hit the nail on the head there really - they think they can charge the same amount, and get away with it. I would put it to them that very few people are going to buy ebooks if they cost the same amount as a standard book, because it's not an easy concept to understand. By all accounts, you're getting less for your money (the only benefit is the speed of the transmission method, but that's got sod all to do with the publisher), so why doesn't it cost less? If I could get a 20% discount on books, and more of them were available, I would have bought an e-reader and a stack of books by now.
As things stand, I'm spending a lot of time in the library, and buying a load of second-hand, scribbled on books. Who loses?
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