There have been a number of polls and surveys recently that indicate there is some market resistance to the Amazon Kindle e-book reader based primarily on its price tag. Currently, the Kindle costs $360, which includes the wireless Whispernet™ delivery process.
Although our publishing company, Slipdown Mountain Publications LLC, has made many of our books available on the Kindle, we currently do not have one in the office. This is partly because we live in a remote area where wireless service is spotty and unreliable and partly because of the hefty price tag. For me personally, I would buy one if the price were under $100 and just take it to town with me when I wanted to add some new titles.
I think Amazon needs to think of the Kindle the way cell phone providers think of their phones — make the thing really cheap (or even free) so people will sign up just to get the cool features offered.
But what do you think? How cheap would it have to be for your to buy a Kindle? Take our quick poll below and, if you have opinions that go beyond just the cost, add a comment to this post.
OK, this won’t be scientific but it might be interesting. Go ahead and forward this post’s URL to anyone you know who might have an opinion on the matter.
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2 Comments
June 29, 2008 at 1:16 pm
It’s not so much the price of the device the prevents me from buying one, but its lacking capabilities and Amazon’s pricing of e-books.
I’m an academic scientist, and would buy a device almost regardless of its price if I could easily load up my thousands of PDF files of technical papers from my own computer and read them at full size and unaltered. Better yet, to be able to view images in PDF format at higher resolution that the Kindle is capable of, and in color. There has been plenty written about the poor performance of all available e-readers currently on the market in this regard.
Additionally, the pricing of technical e-books by Amazon makes it so that there is little incentive to buy a Kindle for that purpose. Picking a random example just now, the paper version of Advances in Robot Kinematics (Springer) costs $219.00, and the Kindle version $175.00 – a 20% savings. All mathematics and physics books offer equally little savings between versions. That just isn’t going to do it for me.
If there were very large reductions in the pricing of technical e-books in comparison to their paper versions, or if PDF files were better and more easily handled, I’d think it likely that the Kindle would be a major success within the academic community.
June 29, 2008 at 1:55 pm
T. M.,
Pricing of e-books is a tricky process for publishers. First, we have to decide whether the value of the product is primarily the physical form (i.e., the printed book) or primarily the information or entertainment contained within it or even the author’s lifetime of experience and knowledge.
After all, authors should derive as much income from royalties regardless of the format, and publishers do have to make a profit to remain in business.
There is no single answer to the question of how much to discount an e-book from the printed book’s price.
If only there were…