Making Your Kindle Pay For Itself Within A Year
E-book readers are very popular these days. A lot of the credit for that must go to the Amazon Kindle of course – but there are plenty of other e-book readers to choose from today. However, even with the greatly increased number of readers available, the Kindle is still the leader of the pack – by a long way.
The e-book reader market – in its commercial format at least – is still very new. This sector may be growing extremely quickly, but it is still in nascent form and in its developmental phase. For example, there is no agreed industry wide standard for the formatting of e-books. Many of the new e-book readers seem to be adopting the ePub format. Amazon’s Kindle has its own proprietary format for Kindle books – and it has attracted a fair bit of criticism for this in the past.
The theory is that having an industry standard would allow e-books to be transferred from one e-book reader to another and allow end users more freedom when it comes to sourcing e-books. Greater choice and more purchasing options should be good for the consumers and lead to lower prices, It’s easy enough to see the logic. It makes sense.
On the other hand, Amazon certainly have a long pedigree of offering good value in the field of reading – be it hardback, paperback or e-books. Their publicly stated strategy of making Kindle books available for $ 9.99 or less has led to some fairly terse discussions with many of the large publishing houses who are, even now, fighting hard to protect the sale of hardback editions.
A recent study, undertaken by the New York Times newspaper, examined the average price of e- books for the Kindle, Sony Daily Edition and the Barnes and Noble Nook readers. 10 books are selected from the NYT’s best books list of 2009 – 5 non-fiction and 5 fiction titles – and the prices for these were compared across the 3 readers. The Kindle was found to have an average price of $13.69 per book. The average price for the Sony reader was $15.26 and the Nook had a significantly higher 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 hard to imagine Amazon’s Kindle winding up as the Betamax of e-book readers. Adherents of the Sony reader can make of that what they will. In all probability, the main discussion for the immediate future is likely to be between the major publishing houses and distributors of e-books. Only when they realise that the world of publishing has moved on will the field be clear for industry standards to be agreed and good customer value to be delivered.
Learn more about the Amazon Kindle for yourself and view the wide range of Kindle accessories available to help you personalise your reader.
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