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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.
but I want something with a color screen at least (i know its too much to ask but oh well)
...if the convenience factor wasn't part of the equation.
Isn't this largely the point? Who the hell is making a decision to purchase this based on book cost?
The convenience factor is the equation. The whole equation.
Also, even if it were not about the experience, I cannot resell books from the Kindle. So the TCO is much higher than the books assuming that I resell all those that do not rock my world.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
I just got back from vacation and guess what...I FINALLY saw a Kindle in the wild at the airport. I just don't see this thing taking off. The iPhone or something similar has a much greater chance of making it big as an e-book reader. At least with a cell phone you can justify the cost because you can use it for more than just reading books.
And you're locked in to the kindle forever, until they stop supporting it at least:/
Not to be a ra-ra anti-DRM fanboi at every story, but it's somewhat relevant here.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Amazon needs to offer electronic copies of books I order for a small up charge. I still want the real book. I still want the experience of having a real collection even when the tech is old/broken/unsupported. In bed at night I still want to turn the pages. However, I'd love to have the convenience provided by the Kindle when traveling and even for purchasing. Buy the book now, read instant on the Kindle, get the hard copy in the mail two days later. I'd buy a Kindle regardless of generation/tech in an instance if this plan existed.
As I have argued ad nauseam here (PDF) and elsewhere, Ebook readers sinply won't take off big-time until the manufacturers forget their proprietary formats and go for something sensible.
Unfortunately, "something sensible" doesn't mean some HTML bodge, RTF kludge, or non-reprocessable binary like PDF, but a persistent, parsable, non-proprietary, standard. Gosh, isn't that what XML was supposed to do?
Sure, you can get sunlight readable color screens but they chew power and are costly.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
With a real hardback book I can resell it on amazon for most of what I paid for it. Moreover I can buy it used to begin with. So the cost estimates here are off by a factor of 8 to 10 at least. Of course here is some inconvenience i reselling. On the other hand I can also buy a lot more books at one time for the same price and keep them till I'm ready to read. Conveience to me is being able to toss a book in my airplane bag or beach bag. I'm not taking my kindle to the pool or the beach. I'm not going to leave it outside on the patio table while I go take a pee or refill my drink. And I'm certainly not parking it beside the piss pot, or taking it in the bathtub with me. Besides, being old school, I find there's a great deal of visceral nature to books that somehow is part of the reading. Even being able to dog ear a page or write in the margins of certain kinds of books is a very good way to use them effectively. Not to mention...convenient.
Most students buy their books used and sell most of them back to the bookstore at the end of the semester.
Yeah, you buy them used at 90% of the original cost and sell them back at 10%.
But yeah, I agree with both points: the Kindle can't handle the requirements of text books, and the publishers have no interest in changing the status quo (especially not by making things easier for the students).
sic transit gloria mundi
It's consider that a much more interesting topic.
The idea of giving free cellular data service away with a device is basically the exact opposite of what the rest of the industry does.
You can get an iPhone for $200, but then you're obligated to pay ~10x that amount for wireless service over the next couple of years. A Kindle costs $350 and has free wireless for how long? forever?
Can that business model really be profitable in the long term? If so, I'd say it's a great deal for the consumer. But I have to wonder how many people have to do a bit of web browsing on their Kindle before Amazon starts losing money on wireless bills, and decides to remove features or connectivity?
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
No shit.
Look, give me a black and white epaper device that can display things.
Forward, back, select, exit, it doesn't need more controls or intelligence than a cheap-ass MP3 player. You can probably steal the chip from those 'picture frame' things.
Don't give me one with a damn wifi connection, or a computer in it. A single USB connection, or a single SD card slot, would be fine. Rechargeable batteries would be a bonus, but not required. (From what I understand, those things use almost no batteries.)
Hell, it doesn't even have to display 'text'...if it can just display GIFs with consecutive filenames, and requires a conversion program to put books on there, I wouldn't mind one bit.
Something like that should actually cost 50 dollars, and 45 dollars of that should be the epaper.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
You can't surf on the web, you can only buy books on it from Amazon's store.
Convenience is the name of the game for the Kindle. Always having the newest magazines and newspapers available at the tip of your fingers is an amazing feature for commuters. Instead of bringing a book, Newsweek, and the New York Times, you can bring your Kindle. Did you read a favorable book review? Well, download the book! Instant gratification. I also read two or three books at a time. One tends to be intellectual and the others are pop trash. Instead of choosing which books to take, I can just bring them all with me on the Kindle and read whatever I want on the five hour long train ride from New York to Boston.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
It's not just about selling. Most of the value in culture is sharing. If I have a real physical book, I can lend it to my friend. I can give it to a family member. I can say "read this; I loved it". If it's locked into my Kindle then that's much less likely to happen. That may not happen with every book, but you don't know which ones are going to be important till you read them.
A real book is worth much more than a DRM controlled image of one.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
E-books offer almost 0 benefit for casual or 'entertainment' reading.
I *strongly* disagree.
I've done most of my entertainment reading on eBook devices for six or seven years now, and it's a hugely better way to read. When traveling I can easily take a dozen or more books with me on the device, and I have a huge library -- hundreds of books -- on my laptop, ready to install on the eBook should I want something different. Since my eBook reader has a backlit screen I can read in the dark, including in bed where the backlight on its lowest setting is plenty of light for me to read, but not enough to disturb my wife's sleep. Because it doesn't require two hands to hold it, I can read while eating, exercising, etc. If I put it in a ziploc baggie, I can read at the beach, in the bathtub, outside in the rain -- lots of places a paper book would be badly damaged. Because the font size is adjustable, I can read with the book near or far, as long as it's close enough to reach the "next page" button periodically.
If you're a heavy reader, there's great value in ebooks. Stay away from the DRM crap, though. That's my biggest reason for not getting a Kindle. I bought a few device-locked books early on, with my first Rocket eBook, and quickly found that they're more trouble than they're worth. Usually overpriced, too.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
When we already have handheld devices (phones, iPods, Blackberries, Palms, Pocket Windows) and cheap notebooks (Asus eee, XO, thousands of Wintel laptops?)
All of these devices can display ebooks -- and already are, and have been for YEARS.
My Tungsten E might be old and a little power-hungry, but I read ebooks on it all the time. Heck, even the trendy but otherwise pointless iPod has now morphed into a real PDA. Took Apple long enough, but they finally reinvented the Newton.
Amazon is way late to the party with a device which does nothing else useful. I just don't get it. These single-purpose dedicated devices are a waste of time, space, and money.
How come people like the New York Times still haven't figured out that e-*books* have long since arrived, but ebook *readers* are a technological dead end?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I have a Sony PRS-505 eBook reader, and I love it. I love the e-ink, I love having all my books in one place (and it saves lots of space - don't need huge bookshelves). I like being able to backup all my books. There are many advantages to eBooks. But I did not spend $250 on the eBook reader because i somehow managed to convince myself that since eBooks cost a few dollars less than traditional bound paper books I'd save myself money in the long run. Only an idiot would convince themselves that an eBook reader is a way to save money. It's not. You can always buy USED paper books (go to Half-Price Books or another used book store) cheaper than you can buy new-release eBooks. But that doesn't mean it's not a useful device. That being said, many copyrighted ebooks can be downloaded for free on bittorrent sites (not saying one should do this). In that case, it would save money assuming you would otherwise be purchasing the books in traditional format from Amazon or somewhere else. But don't kid yourself, buying eBooks for $14 instead of traditional paper books for $17 is not going to offset the cost of a $250-$300 electronic device anytime in your near future. Hopefully nobody is dumb enough to use frugality as a reason to drop a few hundred bucks on an Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader. People are dumb, but that's the level of stupidity at which people probably are not going to be doing a lot of reading, let alone book-buying in the first place. I love my Sony Reader, but it was a luxury that I paid for, and I have no illusions that it will be saving me money anytime in the near future.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
I don't have a kindle or whatever the sony device is called. I am not at college or any other educational establishment. But I like reading, and I end up in some odd places, and am away from home a lot of the time. So I use my phone. (HTC Trinity)
Ok, I can see the "screen too small" arguments already, but it does ok for me (320x240 or 60mm x 45mm). With font smoothing turned on, and the backlight set just as I like it, and using my preferred font at my preferred size (all these are fully adjustable), I can read just as well as I can a normal book. I'm only reading truly literary stuff, no diagrams, although things like the maps from LOTR display fine. I only need to gently touch the RH of the screen with my thumb to turn the page, and can annotate, bookmark, highlight and refer to a dictionary where necessary. I have hundreds of ebooks on an SD card, some bought and others from manybooks.net which has the gutenberg library available in all the main formats.
My phone fits in 1 hand, if I get a call it switches to that mode by itself and doesn't "lose" my place. In fact I can have several books on the go at once. As soon as I open any book, it returns to the page I was last on, I don't have to enable that or specifically bookmark anything. The kindle type devices apart from being too large (for my purposes) and being single purpose, have one major flaw when compared to real paper books. You can only have 1 book open at once. I'm not sure how it goes these days, but when I was at school, I would normally have at least 2 books open at once when doing any kind of research. Unless you buy two (or 3) kindles then you will never have that capability. Also, I don't think paper books are replaceable by electronics. The library would becomes a fairly empty souless place once that happened. Part of the appeal of a library to me, is being surrounded by millions of documents that contain the majority of the worlds knowledge and dreams. A couple of servers wouldn't have the same gravitas.
Viewing a single page of text is an unusual way of reading (for me anyway), and if I were to get a full size document reader, it would have to display 2 pages at once, just like a real book. But then it would likely not fit in my pocket, it wouldn't play games, mp3s or movie files, it wouldn't have GPS or 3G internet or a calculator, or stereo bluetooth, or SMS, or email. I would need SSH access to my servers, and be able to program my own software and be able to access just about all of the devices hardware with my own code. Maybe convergence is a bad thing for some, but I have all that in one device that fits comfortably in the palm of one hand. It cost a little more than the kindle, but I bought this device 2 years ago and if I were to have individual devices for music/movies and GPS, and reading and programming, then the individual costs would be prohibitive.
But that's just me, YMMV.
of a used textbook! When I was in school lo, these many years ago, I _always_ bought the most marked up books that I could find. I found the additional emphasis on material and margin notes invaluable. Keeping your books in pristine condition actually detracts from their value as far as I'm concerned. :)