My brother gave me a Kindle as a gift last year. I love it; I’m a big reader and it’s especially useful when I travel (I used to pack pounds of books whenever I went away for over a week). And theoretically, I like the idea of buying a book online and having it in my hands instantly. That’s a pleasant convenience. But I’m not willing to pay a premium for it, and that’s the main reason that since I got my Kindle, I’ve bought as many or more “paper” books than eBooks.
It hardly bears explaining, but a paper book is far more expensive for publishers to produce and distribute it; they are physical objects that need to be made, and shipped, and distributed, and sold by human beings. While eBooks almost certainly have some costs associated with their distribution, it stands to reason that they are negligible compared to the process of creating a physical object and sending it around the world.
So, frankly, it makes me angry when I see eBooks priced higher than their paperback equivalents. This isn’t a rare thing, either; in the past couple months, nearly all of the books I’ve browsed on Amazon with the intent to buy are cheaper in paper form.
Some examples (all in U.S. dollars, all Associates links):
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Paperback price: $9.52
Kindle price: $11.99
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Paperback price: $8.22
Kindle price: $9.99
Cloud Atlas: A Novel
Paperback price: $8.82
Kindle price: $11.99
If the Dead Rise Not (Bernie Gunther)
Paperback price: $8.59
Kindle price: $9.99
Now, in most cases I’ve found that the price difference isn’t huge—a couple of dollars, usually. And I’d probably be happy to pay the Kindle price if the paperback wasn’t cheaper. But the very fact that it is in all of these cases drives me insane. I just can’t do it; I can’t pay more for a digital version of a book that is less useful to me. I can’t lend them, really, in any reasonable way—even if the Kindle lending program was available here in Canada, it’s got way too many strings attached and I can’t resell them. And for god’s sake, they’re so much less expensive to produce and deliver to me. As convenient and wonderful as eBooks are, I’m just not happy spending money on them, and if more people catch on, that seems like it might become a problem for the people selling them.
