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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.
...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."
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.
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.
An electronic reader could be a killer application for education. Textbooks are large, heavy, and you usually have more than one per semester. (For the sake of this argument, we'll assume engineering/science/bio/med students.) Electronic substitutes fail completely because they're lacking color, suitable resolution screens for rendering technical drawings, and textbook availability. Yes, we all have laptops now, but honestly, reading a book (or 5) on a laptop sucks. I could care less if I couldn't sell books back if it lets me carry an entire semester's worth of material (plus *all* of my other year's worth of references) in a tiny device vs. tons of dead trees.
this is my sig
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();
The problem with that idea is that textbooks are too profitable an industry to risk modernizing.
Scratch that - education is too profitable an industry to risk modernizing.
The bottom line is: textbooks are a cash cow for the publishers and schools, and while a lot of people talk about saving dead trees, very few actually care because we don't see those dead trees. We see them on TV, we read about them in craptastic magazines (irony!), but that's always "somewhere else" and the idea fades as quickly as it came.
If you really want to save the trees, kill a lawyer. I'd bet one lawyer wastes more paper in a year than an entire classroom.
-Billco, Fnarg.com