Amazon’s Commitment To Cheap Books In Evidence
E-book readers are extremely popular today. 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 probably worth remembering that the e-book reader market – in its commercial form – is still a very new development. The sector continues to grow very quickly, but is still in its developmental phase. There is, for example, no agreed industry standard for the format of e-books. It does seem as if most new readers are opting 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 logic is as follows: The adoption of a uniform industry standard will allow e-books to be transferred from one reader to another thereby giving customers more freedom of choice when it comes to purchasing 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 to make sense.
On the other hand, Amazon certainly have a long pedigree of offering good value in the field of reading – be it hardback, paperback or e-books. Their stated target that Kindle books would have a sales price of $ 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. A total of 10 books – 5 fiction and 5 non-fiction – were picked from the New York Times 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.
Not much evidence of Amazon using their market domination to profit there. 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. The cost of the hardware would be recovered leaving enough money to treat yourself to a few books.
It’s hard to see a scenario where the Amazon Kindle reader winds up as the Betamax of e-books. Advocates of the Sony reader can read into that what they will. In all probability, the main discussion for the immediate future is likely to be between the major publishing houses and distributors of e-books. 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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