Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

* GigaOm says that the Average Revenue Per Month Sprint makes from Kindle owners is around $2 (originally from Nielsen Wire).

1. If we assume 12 cents per MB of data transfer, that’s 16.66 MB of data transferred per user.
2. Given that books are anywhere from .2MB to a few MB, newspapers anywhere from .4 MB to a few MB (per day), and blog subscriptions are probably a few MB per month, that gives us a few possibilities for how the 16.66 MB is broken up -
   

   One likely scenario is that a quarter of Kindle users have a news subscription, and that Kindle users buy 3-6 books a month.

   Another is that more like half of Kindle users have news subscriptions, and that Kindle users buy 1-3 books a month.

3. FierceWireless says that this contrasts with Sprint’s postpaid subscriber Average Revenue per user of $56 per month. No one ever talks about it – However, this is a cost saving that ought to be considered when buying a Kindle.

* Mike Cane covers HP’s ebook reader. Here’s a video (do check out his article; do check out the last 25 seconds for page turning) –

* Michael Hart at Project Gutenberg sets a One Billion Readers goal for Project Gutenberg -

The first goal of Project Gutenberg was simply to reach totals of estimated audiences of 1.5% of the world population, or the total of 100 million people.With the advent of cell phone [mobile phone] access we are now setting our goal at 15% of the world population or 1 billion.

* Cnet does some sketchier analysis based on sketchy analysis by Money Magazine and claims that $9.99 is pretty much the floor for ebooks. The data they use is -

Based on a list price of $27.95 (for The Associate by John Grisham)

$3.55 – Pre-preduction – This amount covers editors, graphic designers, and the like
$2.83 – Printing – Ink, glue, paper, etc
$2.00 – Marketing – Book tour, NYT Book Review ad, printing and shipping galleys to journalists
$2.80 – Wholesaler – The take of the middlemen who handle distribution for publishers
$4.19 – Author Royalties – A bestseller like Grisham will net about 15% in royalties, lesser known authors get less.  Also the author will be paying a slice of this pie piece to his agent, publicist, etc.

This leaves $12.58, Money magazine calls this the profit margin for the retailer.

Basically they don’t mention anything about cost of book returns and that for ebooks wholesaler and retailer get rolled into one (which together account for 65% of the $27.95 price).  

Most importantly, they completely miss the point that publishers and retailers have lower costs and far less risk with an ebook model.

* Mike Cane (again) has a great article on how ebook prices become even more important in the impulse buying driven model the Kindle encourages.

For me, the question that needs to be asked more and more is -

What amount of a book’s brilliance could be gotten solely by the author’s effort?

It might sound scandalous – However, what party, apart from the author, is actually making for a better book?

Is it that the large shares publishers, distributors, retailers are getting is simply for discovering the best books, distributing them, and assuming risks?

In that case the better our discoverability algorithms (or crowdsourcing), the less need for everyone between the author and the reader.

Filed under: news Tagged: | kindle news