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 like the idea of the kindle

[wcb4]

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.