Sunday, March 22, 2009

e-Book e-Price e-Creep

At "Slate," Jacob Weisberg is afraid that he's boring his friends with paeans to his Kindle. I know how he feels. I began preaching in the name of the Kindle last March. I didn't know this, though (from Weisberg's article):
Amazon, which is selling Kindle books at a loss to get everyone hooked, will eventually want to make money on them.
Now that you mention it, until last week every Kindle book I'd bought cost $9.99. Then I paid $16.50 for Brad Gooch's new biography of Flannery O'Connor. According to Amazon, that was a savings of $13.50 over the print edition -- but that's if you use the list price for comparison. Amazon's price for the printed book is $19.80, which means I really only saved $3.30. There's some price creep over at iTunes, too, but it took longer than it has for Kindle.

As print dies, it would be in publishers' and writers' interests to do everything they can to make e-books profitable for Amazon and other suppliers.

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