E-Book Pricing - Huge Differences Exist
Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader has been an enormously successful product for them. It was first released in November of 2007 – but it was the release of the upgraded Kindle 2, in February 2009, which saw e-book readers really take off. Amazon followed up with the large display Kindle DX edition in June of 2009 and the e-book reader market started to grow exponentially.
The Kindle rapidly became the number 1 selling product on the Amazon website. Over the Christmas period of 2009 it became the most gifted Amazon product ever. Inevitably, various other manufacturers either released, or upgraded, their own e-book readers. Higher levels of competition led to reduced prices and gave customers additional options - both of which are desirable of course.
With significantly increased choices on offer, prospective e-book reader buyers need some way to compare the different options available. It’s possible to find a lot of reviews on the internet which compare the Kindle with Sony’s Daily Edition reader, Barnes and Noble’s Nook reader with the iPad etc. However, a comparison of e-book readers which is based solely upon the hardware does not fully capture the essence of the e-book reader experience. As a rule, and as is frequently the situation with personal electronic equipment, the most recent models will tend to include some features which are lacking in the older models. However, considerations such as usability, legibility of the display, how many books are available, the price of books, the ease of buying and downloading books etc. all need to be taken into consideration.
Many of these are subjective and a matter of personal opinion, others lend themselves to analysis more easily, and can be reviewed prior to selecting an e-book reader as a purchase. The Amazon Kindle certainly has an advantage when it comes to the number of Kindle books available. There are over 420,000 books available on Amazon’s website, and the number is getting bigger each and every day. When it comes to the price of books, the Kindle also appears to have a clear advantage.
A recent study carried out by the New York Times looked at the comparative prices of 10 books – selected from the New York Times 10 Best books of 2009, comprising five non-fiction and five fiction titles - on the three best known e-book readers, the Kindle, the Nook from Barnes and Noble and Sony’s PRS reader. The total cost of 10 books for the Kindle was $ 136.87 – an average of $ 13.69 per book. The same set of ten books bought from the Sony store worked out at an average price of $ 15.26 and Barnes and Noble equated to a considerablynotably higher price per book of $ 19.29.
So it seems that, on the basis of these figures, anyone reading a book a week would save to the tune of $300 per annum with the Amazon Kindle as opposed to the Nook. In fact, the Kindle reader would finance itself and there would still be a few dollars left over to buy books, in under 12 months. There’s a great deal of discussion taking place between e-book retailers and the major publishing houses right now, so perhaps e-book prices could be liable to change in the future. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that anyone thinking about purchasing an e-book reader would be well advised to analyse both the availability of books and their cost before finally choosing the e-book reader.
