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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.
The advantage e-books have over dead-tree versions is in technical material. Shop manuals, technical schematics, medical journals, etc. Any material where being able to 'search' would be a benefit. E-books offer almost 0 benefit for casual or 'entertainment' reading. But that isn't the point. Source material longevity is the key. A good quality hardcover can last HUNDREDS of years! Try that with any electronic device or file-system. I remember a time not too long ago when 16 registers on a CPU were a big deal, and DOS apps couldn't read Mac files (even the 'simple' ASCII txt files) and there were different file-system structures 7bit vs 8bit vs *. We think that .txt is the safest solution for portability and longevity but IBM used to think the same thing about punch-cards!
If you are going to invest enough money in a Kindle to make it a 'worthy' purchase, then you are that-much-more going to benefit 50 years from now with your library of real-books and a pair of eyeballs as your interface to them.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
His analysis of the kindle as a vehicle for college textbooks doesn't work.
Most students buy their books used and sell most of them back to the bookstore at the end of the semester. If publishers started offering textbooks for the kindle, they'd presumably be DRM'd, and you wouldn't be able to sell them back. The publishers hate the used textbook market, and they do anything they can to kill it off (e.g., a new edition of a calculus textbook every 2-3 years), so there's no question in my mind that they'd use DRM to eliminate it.
Most lower-division textbooks in most subjects are in a large, color format with a layout so complex that it makes every page look like the cockpit of a 747. This doesn't work on the kindle.
He seems to assume that the cost of a college textbook mainly has to do with paper, printing, and binding (ppb), so that it would be much cheaper in electronic form. Actually, ppb is no more than a small fraction of the cost of most textbooks.
He seems to assume that the only way to read an electronic book is on a special e-book reader, and then he goes on to calculate how long it would take to earn back the high cost of a kindle. But nearly all college students either have a laptop or a desktop machine, so the only logical reason for them to buy a kindle would be the same as for anyone else: convenience.
Find free books.
Kindle's wireless deliveries only work inside the USA. Likewise you can't buy content without a US credit card.
This rules out a large chunk of their potential customers, and one of the huge benefits of buying a Kindle. It also means many overseas book sellers won't want their content used on Kindles.
My mother (in Australia) wanted to get one, largely because she can adjust the text on the screen. Here eyes are not what they used to be and she gets stronger and stronger prescriptions on her glasses.
It is the lack of access and the cost that are the biggest obstacles for her. To me is seems the Kindle is an American-only club that provides a good ebook reader at high cost.
Those at Amazon really need to broaden their perspective if this is to take off.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
You'll be waiting 5 years at least. I'm probably getting an iliad DR1000SW or PlasticLogic's model next year because they finally got the screen size up to snuff.
The economic analysis in the summary at least is a bit shortsighted. You can save a little on newspaper subscriptions since they don't have to deliver to you or you don't have to waste gas getting one and there are a lot of good free (legally) books online to learn languages/programming/anything but don't want to sit on the computer for. Like this one:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/
or
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/
When I sat down years ago to read those or other books on the computer, it just was a pain. I couldn't use my computer for other things as easily and the eyestrain of a backlighted screen all day. Years back, without a second monitor, it was kinda a pain to follow some programming examples and keep switching back and forth.
Add to that the convenience of having all your books in a memory card or single harddrive. It was a factor driving mp3 music players vs CDs and CDs are much easier to carry around than books.
What is wrong with the current set of books is this:
-screen size (recently solved with the iRex DR1000S - now they have models out big and small good for newspaper/technical_reading/textbooks vs fiction)
-screen refresh rate (too slow on all models)
-only 4 (16 iliad) shades right now
-klutzy software (Apple could exploit this market sooner or later)
-battery life in some models (e-Ink doesn't use any energy once screen is rendered - yet some manufacturers build these things to be recharged almost daily instead of weekly), turn the page and switch it off
-no color
For me, battery life and software and screen size is what I'm not going to compromise on, all others I'm flexible. It probably will be different for everyone. The potential benefits are tremendous though.
I know it's in poor style to reply to one's self post, but this time I really had to; I must retract what I said earlier - NO I can not recover my costs quickly, at all! The Kindle versions of my textbooks are effing expenisve! So expensive in fact, that I feel 0 motivation to buy them. Compare the Kindle version of this textbook to the hardcover version of the same
That's only US$20 of difference in price. I'm not going to bother gettin e-books.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I don't own a Kindle. I did not need the web browsing and considered it a distraction so I went with Sony's eReader PRS-505. I can go to my local library's web site, hit the ebook section and download books in Acrobat format (Adobe Digital Editions) These transfer to my reader with just a click and I keep the books there for 2 weeks, just like from the library. I also download eBooks from all over the net, sometime a classic from Gutenberg (open it in Word, takes about 5 minutes to strip the hard returns and save as RTF for import to my reader), sometimes Its a web page that I save (snagged lots of Lovecraft that way) and soemtimes its a mobi file from someplace else, which I convert to the native format with a single command line Mobi2LRF call or by using Kovid Goyal's Calibre software.
I never seem to have time to make it to the library. Killer commute, full time job, on and off school and 3 kids leaves very little time for anything else. I also hate finishing a novel someplace (like while eating lunch at work) and not having another book at the ready. I also find it a bit of a pain to carry a bunch of novels (even paperbacks) around with me. As a consequence, I did not read a lot for fun until the first of this year, when I found that with all of the free CDs from Baen, I had about the entire Honor Harrington Series, and a friend recommended them, so I bit. I bought the $279 PRS-505... Well, I read all 17 of those novels, and the text books for schools were available as ebooks, so I read all the material from my last 2 classes on it, then I found out that Tor was giving away novels before their new web site went live, so I snagged those and read them and the library had a few good books that caught my eye, etc, etc, etc. I've read about 100 novels or so so far this year, and I am now starting reading some of the old Shadow and Doc Savage novels that I found online. You CAN'T discount the convenience factor. I carry my PRS wth me just about everywhere I go. It slips nicely into the out section of my laptop case. I charge it about once per week, It is the single best investment I have made in a long time and I have recommended it to several people who are considering but are still unable to decide between the Sony and the Kindle (unless you plan to buy books from Amazon while on the bus because you can't stand to download a file before you leave the house, or unless you really need another internet device, but one without all the interactivity, I recommend the much cheaper and nicer looking Sony).
If you can ask this question, you have not actually read anything from an eInk based device. I'm not being a smart ass. I thought the same thing and I used to read books on my Toshiba e805 which has a full VGA screen with a dpi as high as the iPhone (one of the best looking displays ever put on a PDA). Then I saw eInk. Like someone above, I also own the Sony, not the Kindle, and for remarkably similar reasons. If you have ever read anything on one of the eInk devices, you don't go back. You buy a booklight for when you want to read in the dark, and you never look back. I now use the iPhone as a PDA, and the eReader to read books. The Toshiba is in its case, sitting on my shelf somewhere.
I reject your reality
When you lose it, drop it, or otherwise break it, you're screwed. Look at how many people lose their cell phones | drop them in the toilet | can't remember where they left them ...
If I somehow lose or destroy a $5 paperback, I'm out $5. How many would I have to lose before I reach the cost of 1 kindle?
Plus books look good on a shelf. I can find the exact book I'm looking for in seconds, and most of the time, with reference manuals, the exact page quickly enough - most reference books come with something called an "index" They even come with a meta-index - though they call it a "table of contents", so the whole "I can search it" is moot. Now, does it blend?
The segway didn't change transportation. Neither will the kindle change my reading habits. And it's a stupid name, to boot. "Kindle" - you can't even burn it
25 years ago Borland came out with Turbo Pascal with its famous "Book License" and the nearly unheard of release-with-no-copy-protection. Treat the disk/program like a book: Give it away, throw it away, whatever. Just be sure though, like a book, it could not possibly be in use in two places at the same time.
Quite a 'novel' idea for software and for consumer property rights.