Making Your Kindle Pay For Itself Within A Year
E-book readers are currently very popular. Much of the credit for that must be given to the Amazon Kindle reader of course – although there are many other e-book readers to choose from today. Even with so many new e-book readers available on the market, the Kindle is still the market leader – and by a long way.
It should be remembered that the e-book reader market -at least as a commercial enterprise – is still very new. This sector is expanding very quickly indeed, but it is still under development. For example, there is no agreement in the industry as to what format e-books should be stored in. Many of the new e-book readers seem to be going for the ePub format. Amazon has its own proprietary format for the Kindle books used on its Kindle reader – and it has received some criticism for this in the past.
In theory, an industry standard e-book format would allow books to be ported from one e-book reader to another. It would also allow customers more choice when buying e-books. More buying options and a greater degree of choice should be good for customers and tend to produce lower prices. You see the logic.
Amazon, with their proprietary Kindle format, can justifiably point to their long pedigree of offering their customers excellent value for money in the field of reading – hardback, paperback or e-book. Their stated strategy of selling Kindle books for $9.99 or less, has resulted in some uncomfortable negotiations with some of the major book publishing houses are trying to defend their profits from the sale of hardback books.
A recent study, carried out by the New York Times, looked at the average book price for the Kindle, Nook and Sony Daily Edition readers. Ten books, five fiction and five non-fiction, were selected from the NYT’s 2009 best books list. It was found that the Kindle had an average price of $ 13.69, the Sony reader’s average price was $ 15.26 and the Nook had an astonishing average price 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. It would pay for itself and still leave you with enough money to buy a few books.
It’s difficult to imagine that the Amazon Kindle will wind up as the Betamax of the e-book world. Fans of Sony’s daily edition can take that any way they like. It seems likely that, for the moment at least, the main discussion that needs to take place is between the major publishers and e-book retailers. Only when all involved are agreed that the world of reading and publishing has changed will it be appropriate to agree on industry standards.
Learn more about the Amazon Kindle for yourself and view the wide range of Kindle accessories available to help you personalise your reader.
Tags: books, ebooks, electronics, gadgets, mobile computing, personal tech, reading, technology