SWIMBO reads about 4 books a week, so, for Christmas, I thought I would buy her a Kindle.
So far so good - good for the environment, no wood pulp or petro based inks etc
As a pdf has no overheads except for the royalties and the initial transcription, why is the pricing of
this so inverse?
Confused of Cornwall
(I could just download it on a torrent site and have done with it!)
[Edited on 30/11/10 by Mark Allanson]
Publishers protecting their revenue stream!!
I'm 100% with you - you pay £150 + for a decent electrickery box to read the 'books' on..... and then pay more for the
'books' than a proper book (which is a format that has worked perfectly for centuries) would cost....... modern world gone mad
yep, easier to copy now, so they put the price up to cover any loss from piracy i guess
on the plus side though, you can buy it for £7 new in hardcover, or an extra 70p for a used one 
[Edited on 30/11/10 by blakep82]
I totaly agree. I bought my wife a Kindle for Christmas last year and she loves it, but the prices of the eBooks are outrageous. With no printing or materials costs and minimal distribution costs they really should be cheaper than the tree based versions.
Because reading it on "kindle" is convenient. It's a convenient tax. For the same reason that newspapers are becoming increasingly free and you have to pay for the online contents whereas it was t'other way round..... They charge that much because people will pay that much for the books.
The publishing industry is going through the same stage of panic-stricken idiocy that the music/film industries did a few years ago now. That they
haven't looked at what happened and learnt any lessons at all is slightly odd (although of course you could argue that neither have the film and
music industries...). Keeping the pricing where it is at the moment isn't going to get the ebook market taking off in a big way, they really need
to drop the price substantially to make it appear to be reasonable value when compared against the relative costs of music/film downloads compared to
their hard copy equivalents.
The argument that most publishing houses trot out is that the cost of physically making and distributing an actual book isn't all that much, but
ebooks get charged VAT whereas normal books don't, hence the difference in price. Personally I think it's cobblers.
There have been a couple of decent blogs on the BBC recently about the totally different ideas between buying a paper book, where you actually own the
paper, ink, cover, binding etc but not the copyright to what's actually written in it, and the ebook where essentially all you are doing is
renting the rights to look at a file, you have ownership of nothing.
The books are so heavily protected by encryption and other security measures that as far as I know nobody has managed to pirate them.
quote:
Originally posted by britishtrident
The books are so heavily protected by encryption and other security measures that as far as I know nobody has managed to pirate them.
Its a tenner a month for a subscription to Times Online as well I think - that you can read through your kindle.
You could always buy a Sony version or similar which isn't tied down to Amazon and you can convert other formats like PDF, Word Docs or plain
text into its eBook format yourself...
quote:
Originally posted by blakep82
quote:
Originally posted by britishtrident
The books are so heavily protected by encryption and other security measures that as far as I know nobody has managed to pirate them.
it won't be long
quote:
Originally posted by britishtrident
The books are so heavily protected by encryption and other security measures that as far as I know nobody has managed to pirate them.
You pay VAT on ebooks too, but not on real books...
There's a huge storm brewing over the cost of ebooks, and it'll end in tears before too long.
As has already been said they don't learn, this is just like charging nearly twice the price for a CD as a vinyl LP when they first came out, yet the costs of producing were vastly smaller for the CD's & look whats happened now, how many CD's do they sell now compared with 10 years ago? It's the same thing with games & software, the higher the prices the more they get pirated - surprise surprise! Perhaps if they tried pricing the stuff more reasonably people wouldn't bother to try & rip it off!
Maybe i'm getting old but i'd rather have a real book anyway!! I spend too much time looking at a computer screen already with work etc - its nice to pick up something on paper for a change!!
I'm getting a Kindle 3 soon and as far as I'm aware they use the Kindle format and PDF files.
Wouldn't say £7 was unreasonable. £9 is a little steep considering it's a text file. £20 rrp is, well, I persume it's a tome rather than a book (Ben Collins is 150 now isn't he?)