On the Economics of the Kindle

perlow writes "Just how many books a year would you need to read before the cost of Amazon's Kindle is justified? The answer is not so cut-and-dried. If you're a college student and all of your texts were available on Kindle (possible but unlikely), you could recover the cost of the reader in a semester and a half. For consumers to break even with Kindle's cost in that time, they would have to be in the habit of buying and reading four new hardback books per month — if the convenience factor wasn't part of the equation. At two books per month, breakeven would be in three years." Here is the spreadsheet if you want to play with the numbers.

Comments

Re:I'll stick to books

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

To be fair, e-ink is about the least screen-like screen you are likely to find. Like paper, it is non-emissive and works only by reflecting ambient light.

I'm not about to buy one; but the Kindle's screen is one of its major selling points over various other cheaper and/or more versatile electronic reading widgets.

Re:Color is hard to do

[corsec67]

Readability has to be as good as, or almost as good as, printed text. Mono screens are clearer and work far better in bright light and use less power.
Sure, you can get sunlight readable color screens but they chew power and are costly.

Apparently you missed the part where the Kindle uses an E-paper display, so it uses power only to change the display, doesn't have a backlight, and is sunlight readable.
A color version would have 1/3 the resolution, if they were able to make red, green, and blue versions of the pixels in the current display.

In general, sunlight readable displays could chew much less power than normal displays if you can turn off the backlight, like in the OLPC XO-1.

Re:i like the idea of the kindle

[easyTree]

when there are better options available

Like the irex iliad..

Open source; drm-free; supports non propietary formats including pdf, text, html, mobi, etc..

It's not perfect but it's a joy to use. Check out the thought that's gone into the (physical) user interface. A conveniently-placed flip-bar vaguely mimics the action of turning a page in a dead-tree book. Has a built-in wacom tablet so you can point, annotate. Has wifi allowing downloading of updates and books from their servers or from a share at some ip address you specify. Should you find some vast source of drm-free books (one example of which is project gutenberg) the hardware (which incidentally has a great look, feel and somewhat bizarrely, smell) may be your last book-related expense!

Disclaimer: I own one so am biased.

Re:i like the idea of the kindle

[Garwulf]

"Scratch that - education is too profitable an industry to risk modernizing"

It's a bit more complicated than that.

Let me preface my comments with this: first, I own a small publishing company that among other things, publishes a textbook (at $32.95 US). Second, there are a lot of academic books that are overpriced, and in some cases absolute rip-offs. There is even a company that will remain nameless whose prices have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with reality, and which has absolutely no issues whatsoever with charging $100 for a book that shouldn't be reselling for more than $60.

That being said, modernizing the textbook industry probably wouldn't work at this point in time. And that has nothing to do with the companies - it has to do with the students. They generally prefer a printed book.

I know this because the textbook in question was one I helped write, and we tested it as a free e-book in the class it was written for. At the end of the class, we asked for feedback on the textbook so that we could do some fine-tuning. The comment we got more often than all of the others combined was a complaint that it wasn't a printed book. Keep in mind that these were university students, and we GAVE them the e-book. Not so much as a cent changed hands.

For all the strengths of the e-book, people have to first want to buy it. And when you're looking for something that you can write notes in, an e-book generally won't fit the bill. For that matter, it's a lot easier to deal with a book printed on actual paper than an electronic copy, and that isn't likely to change any time soon. So long as the e-book adds barriers to entry rather than taking them away - and since an e-book requires a reader, electricity, and has to deal with file formats, those barriers aren't going away - the printed book will remain the standard.