E-Book Pricing – Buyer Beware

    by on Friday, September 3rd, 2010 | No Comments

    E-book readers are very popular these days. A lot of the credit for that must go to the Amazon Kindle of course – but there are plenty of other e-book readers to choose from today. Nevertheless, even although there is huge variety of e-book readers available today, the Kindle retains its number 1 position.

    It’s worth bearing in mind that the e-book reader market – in its commercial format – is still a recent development. The sector is growing rapidly, but it is still in a developmental phase. For example, there is no agreed standard method of formatting e-books within the industry. There does seem to be a tendency among the new e-book readers to opt for the ePub format. The Kindle of course has its own proprietary format – something for which it has come in for a fair bit of criticism in the past.

    The theory is that having an industry standard would allow e-books to be transferred from one e-book reader to another and allow end users more freedom when it comes to sourcing e-books. Greater choice and more purchasing options should be good for the consumers and lead to lower prices, It’s easy enough to see the logic. It seems sensible enough.

    Amazon, on the other hand, certainly has enough demonstrable experience of offering customers good value for money when it comes to reading – whether it be hardback, paperback, or e-book editions. Their publicly stated strategy of making Kindle books available for $ 9.99 or less has led to some fairly terse discussions with many of the large publishing houses who are, even now, fighting hard to protect the sale of hardback editions.

    A recent study, performed by the New York Times, analysed the average book price for the Kindle, Nook and the Sony Daily Edition readers. Ten books, five fiction and five non-fiction, were selected from the NYT’s 2009 best books list. It was found that the Kindle books had an average price of $ 13.69, the Sony readers average price per book was $ 15.26 and the Nook had a very much higher average price per book of $ 19.29 per book.

    There does not seem to be any evidence that Amazon are using their market leadership position to profiteer. In fact, based upon these numbers, if you read a book a week then the Kindle would save you $ 300 a year compared to the Nook. It would finance itself and you would still have some money left over to buy a few books.

    It’s hard to see a scenario where the Amazon Kindle reader winds up as the Betamax of e-books. Adherents of the Sony reader can make of that what they will. For the immediate future, it looks as if the main discussion may need to be held between e-book distributors and the major publishing houses. Only when they realise that the world of publishing has moved on will the field be clear for industry standards to be agreed and good customer value to be delivered.


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