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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.
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.
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