Kindle owners rebel at inflated book prices

by Stevie Smith - Apr 10 2009, 15:00

After splashing out a really rather exorbitant $360 USD in order to secure a unit of Amazon’s Kindle book reader, it’s perhaps fair to assume that much of said dollar outlay will be gradually recouped through the benefits of easy access to a much cheaper digital download format, right? Wrong.

While there may be no physical materials, publishing costs, or storage concerns involved with the distribution and supply of electronic books, Kindle owners (and also Sony Reader owners) are quickly discovering that, in some cases, they’re expected to pay vastly more for a digital purchase than they would for a paper copy.

More pointedly, a growing group of disgruntled Kindle owners have begun using Amazon’s own tagging system to warn potential electronic customers against buying titles with prices that don’t at least match the general $10 USD price of a conventional paperback.

If a download is over priced in the eyes of said Kindle owners – and some books can reach to beyond $14 USD – it soon finds itself sporting a cautionary “9.99 boycott” tag, which is only removed once the price drops to the boycott tag’s defined ceiling.

However, while the proactive consumers fight for fairer pricing, David Carnoy of CNET writes that it’s not Amazon that should be the target their vitriol, but rather the fat cat book publishers. Carnoy even suggests Amazon is barely breaking even on best-selling titles priced at $10 USD, while Sony’s online ebook store typically sells stock at an even higher price than Amazon and is also failing to draw significant profit.

So why are publishers insisting such high prices are attached to the digital format? Could it be that, while forced to adapt to the advances of technology, they are running scared in the knowledge that electronic books available at sub-paperback prices would attract the book-reading masses (not just curious tech lovers) to platforms such as the Kindle?

And, considering the associated hardware prices connected to the Kindle and Reader, if digital downloads were favourably priced, the publishers would be forced to watch their profits bleed while the likes of Amazon and Sony reaped the per-unit reward.

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