Kindle Pricing Is Still Wrong
My lovely wife bought me an Amazon Kindle for Christmas. It’s a fabulous gift and I’ve really enjoyed reading on it. The whole experience is fantastic. All of the questions that I had about it haven’t been an issue at all. I’ll write another post about what those concerns were and how/why they’ve simply melted away. But right now, I want to say again that the pricing on Kindle books is completely wrong.
Tonight, I wanted to purchase Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker after seeing Penn Jillette’s strong recommendation about it being “life-changing.” So, off to Amazon I go and search for the title. This is the result I get:
Notice the pricing differences between the versions.
You can see that I can have the hardcover version delivered to my house in 2 days or less for 99 cents less than the Kindle version can be delivered over the Internet to my Kindle. In what universe does this possibly make sense? Am I really to believe that the cost of printing the book, delivering it to the Amazon warehouse, then delivering to me is somehow a negative number such that the content is worth $12.99? Am I supposed to effectively pay a premium for using a more eco-friendly, faster, and safer technology to read this content? How can this be good for the growth of the Kindle market when it’s still possible to sell physical goods for less than their digital counterparts?
The music industry discovered pretty quickly that charging slightly less than the physical good, either by lowering the price of the digital album or increasing the price of the physical made folks more likely to pay for something they could easily steal. It’s not quite as easy to steal ebooks for the average consumer, but it’s pricing crap like this that confuses people.
I’ll reiterate my idea that the best transitional pricing model is one where I pay for the physical item at prices at or just below current prices and then charge around a $3 surcharge to download the digital version immediately. I find it shocking that Amazon isn’t at least testing this pricing model. I also find it shocking that they are completely deaf to suggestions like this and don’t seem to be actively polling their user base as to what they might want.
Filed under: Books, Technology | 5 Comments
Tags: ecommerce, kindle, pricing
Feeds to Eat
Which one did you buy?
Good question. I bought the physical copy in hardback. It’ll be here this afternoon.
I like that you call the Kindle a “safer” technology. Safer than books? I’ve never been let down by a book that I can recall.
Safer in that no planes, trains, trucks, cars, printing presses, ink manufactures, etc. were involved in the process of getting the book to me. Because of that, the likelihood that a human being could be harmed in the course of getting my content to me is considerably less. All of that is on top of not having to cut down trees and turn petrochemicals into inks and the like.
Good point. But I hear you can get a nasty case of carpal tunnel from all that pointing and clicking. It’s not all fun and games!