There are two things that are bothering me
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The first is the price difference between Hard Cover Books and Kindle Books. When you look at the discounted price at which Amazon is selling HardCover BestSellers and the price at which the Kindle editions are sold, the difference is just 5$ to 10$ – sometimes less. I’d reckon that the savings in paper, materials, transportation etc. should add up to more. Also economies of scale should apply more to the Kindle edition than to the HardBacks – Does this make sense? Does anyone have ideas on why the price difference is so low.
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Note: I’ve just randomly picked out 10 or so bestseller books and compared – this is by no means exhaustive.
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Newspapers – For the NYTimes, you save approximately 13$ a month if you live outside NYC and 6$ if you live inside NYC. That’s good – since obviously wirelessly delivered papers should be much cheaper than actal paper. However for the Wall Street Journal, the price for an actual print subscription is 80$ for a year – whereas on the Kindle it’s closer to 120$ for a year. That makes zero sense to me – is it because there are no ads in the Kindle version? Then how come the NYTimes is cheaper?
If anyone has any insight into this, especially into the costs of publishing a book (for publishers) and what the price difference ought to be, it’d be greatly appreciated.
Filed under: kindle, thoughts | Tagged: kindle, kindle economics, kindle financials, kindle price comparison, amazon kindle economics, kindle analysis
There is nothing called “price difference that ought to be”. At best you can talk of cost difference, which is also misleading because costs are a function of volumes. Price is a function of what market can bear.
In this particular case, I wouldn’t expect e-books to be significantly cheaper. A large part of a books costs would really be author fees and marketing costs. The only way to reduce costs significantly is therefore to sell a lot more of them. I wouldn’t expect Kindle to _drive_ sales for most titles, it would certainly add to them.