Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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
Because reading a laptop screen sucks ass if you have to read for any length of time.
Ah I see it's time for the weekly slashdot ebook article again, filled with the same repetitive comments as last time.
Every ebook article has at least one person complain they could never look at a computer screen for more than a few minutes therefore they could never read using a computer. Supposedly, everyone on slashdot is either a gamer or a programmer or hacker or whatever. How are you other gamer/programmers doing it without a monitor? Are you guys ALL using braille readers or speech interfaces? If you are, then more power to you dude. But realizing thats probably about 1% of the readership, I laugh at the other 99%.
Required contents for each weekly slashdot ebook article:
One guy to complain he can't read anything on a computer screen (dude, you go to slashdot for the pictures, like our old pal goatse?)
Another guy to complain all his books have brightly colored pictures (see spot run, run spot run?)
Another guy can't read unless his ebook reader has a built in mp3 player / youtube video player / embedded firefox / etc, you know just like every paperback or hardcover book ever made.
Another guy, whom apparently bathes more than the sterotypical geek, will complain his ebook reader doesn't work so well in the bathtub. Oddly enough no one complains that they can't read paperbacks in the shower. I don't think I've taken a bath since the mid 1980s (before most slashdotters were born?), but don't worry I use my shower once or even twice a day and I never miss not being able to use a book. My advice is bathe with a member of the appropriate sex+species instead of a book, anyway.
Then the other guy complains that his ebook reader only holds a 20 hour charge and he hates it when the battery dies during a reading session (maybe he should nap after nineteen and a half hours of bedtime reading, or sleep somewhere within 100 feet of commercial AC power?)
Then someone else always brings up the "right to read" essay despite the fact that a real slashdotter would never buy a reader that doesn't work with some hack to read plain texts like gutenberg. I waited for that before buying my REB-1150 or whatever its model designation is. Works pretty well. It's a cool story, but everyone here knows it, k thx bye.
There's probably a few other sterotypical ebook comments that I've forgotten.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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
"Scratch that - education is too profitable an industry to risk modernizing"
It's a bit more complicated than that.
Let me preface my comments with this: first, I own a small publishing company that among other things, publishes a textbook (at $32.95 US). Second, there are a lot of academic books that are overpriced, and in some cases absolute rip-offs. There is even a company that will remain nameless whose prices have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with reality, and which has absolutely no issues whatsoever with charging $100 for a book that shouldn't be reselling for more than $60.
That being said, modernizing the textbook industry probably wouldn't work at this point in time. And that has nothing to do with the companies - it has to do with the students. They generally prefer a printed book.
I know this because the textbook in question was one I helped write, and we tested it as a free e-book in the class it was written for. At the end of the class, we asked for feedback on the textbook so that we could do some fine-tuning. The comment we got more often than all of the others combined was a complaint that it wasn't a printed book. Keep in mind that these were university students, and we GAVE them the e-book. Not so much as a cent changed hands.
For all the strengths of the e-book, people have to first want to buy it. And when you're looking for something that you can write notes in, an e-book generally won't fit the bill. For that matter, it's a lot easier to deal with a book printed on actual paper than an electronic copy, and that isn't likely to change any time soon. So long as the e-book adds barriers to entry rather than taking them away - and since an e-book requires a reader, electricity, and has to deal with file formats, those barriers aren't going away - the printed book will remain the standard.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive