E-book readers are extremely popular today. A lot of the credit for that must go to the Amazon Kindle of course – but there are plenty of other e-book readers to choose from today. Even with a hugely increased number of readers available on the market, the Kindle is still number 1 – and by some distance.
It’s probably worth remembering that the e-book reader market – in its commercial form – is still a very new development. The sector is expanding rapidly, but is still very much in an early and developmental stage. For example, there is no agreed standard within the industry as to the correct method of formatting e-books. It does look as if the majority of new readers are lining up behind the ePub format. Kindle books are in Amazon’s proprietary format – something for which Amazon has come in for criticism in the past.
The idea is that, with a single industry standard in place, e-books will be able to be transferred from one reader to another and customers will have a lot more freedom of choice when it comes to buying e-books. Greater choice and more purchasing options should be good for the consumers and lead to lower prices, It’s easy enough to see the logic. It makes a lot of sense.
On the other hand, Amazon certainly have a long pedigree of offering good value in the field of reading – be it hardback, paperback or e-books. Their publicly stated strategy of making Kindle books available for $ 9.99 or less has produced some difficult negotiations with a number of the larger publishing houses who are still fighting hard to safeguard the sale of hardback books.
A recent study, conducted by the New York Times newspaper, examined the average book price for the Kindle, Sony, and the Nook readers. Ten books, five fiction and five non-fiction, were selected from the NYT’s 2009 best books list. It was found that the Kindle books had an average price of $ 13.69, the average price for the Sony reader was $ 15.26 and the Nook had a very much higher average price per book of $ 19.29 per book.
There seems to be very little evidence of Amazon using their market domination to profiteer. As a matter of fact, using these numbers as a basis, anyone who reads a book a week would save $ 300 per annum by choosing the Kindle instead of the Nook. The cost of the hardware would be recovered leaving enough money to treat yourself to a few books.
It’s hard to see a scenario where the Amazon Kindle reader winds up as the Betamax of e-books. Advocates of the Sony reader can read into that what they will. In all probability, the main discussion for the immediate future is likely to be between the major publishing houses and distributors of e-books. Only when they realise that the world of publishing has moved on will the field be clear for industry standards to be agreed and good customer value to be delivered.
ARCONIA: Fantasy by R.L. Geerdes