I was intrigued after reading about Alethea Kontis' book, Enchanted, on John Scalzi's blog; so I went over to Amazon to check it out, thinking I might get the ebook for my iPod Touch.
$11.55 for the hardcover version and $10.36 for the digital version?! For some reason I expected the digital version to be maybe about half the price of the physical book because, well, you don't have printing costs, or storage or shipping costs, and don't you want to entice readers to buy it? Pricing it so close to the physical copy makes no sense whatsoever to me.
I think I'll see whether Borders or MPH carries the title, and if not, how much it'll cost for them to order it for me. If I'm going to pay that much, I'd rather have the real thing anyway.
3 comments:
I think this tells us the real cost of book publication is not in the physical materials.
The real advantage of a digital copy, for me anyway, is that you can carry a whole LIBRARY of books around with you, as opposed to lugging around reams of paper.
When I travel, I may pack two books at most in the past. Nowadays with my Kindle Touch, I carry 30-40 books and that's not even a dent on the Kindle's storage capacity.
Occasionally I do miss the tactile pleasure of flipping pages but the e-ink technology and sheer convenience of the Kindle Touch more than makes up for this.
Julian, I have more than 3,000 books in the Kindle app on my iPod Touch :p But I still prefer to read a real book, and in any case the iPod Touch's screen is just way too small. I'm dreaming of an iPad... perhaps next year :)
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