E-Book Pricing – Buyer Beware

These days, e-book readers are extremely popular. Much of the credit for that must be given to the Amazon Kindle reader of course – but there are plenty of other e-book readers available on the market today. Even with the hugely increased number of readers available, the Kindle is still the market leader – and by some distance.

The e-book reader market – in its commercial format at least – is still very new. This sector may be growing extremely quickly, but it is still in nascent form and in its developmental phase. For example, there is no agreed industry wide standard for the formatting of e-books. Many of the new e-book readers seem to be adopting the ePub format. Amazon’s Kindle has its own proprietary format for Kindle books – and it has attracted a fair bit of criticism for this in the past.

The general theory is that an industry standard format allows e-books to be transferred between e-book readers and gives end-users more freedom when it comes to buying e-books. More choice and a wider selection of purchasing options should certainly be good for consumers and would naturally tend to produce lower prices. The logic is clear and it makes perfect sense.

On the other side of the coin, Amazon can point to their long experience of providing their customers with good value for money in the field of reading – whether it be hardback, paperback or e-book editions. Amazon’s strategy of making Kindle books available for $9.99 or less has resulted in some rather fraught negotiations with some of the larger publishing houses. The publishing houses of course, are keen to safeguard the sale of their lucrative hardback editions.

A recent study, carried out by the New York Times, looked at the average book price for the Kindle, Nook and Sony Daily Edition 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 had an average price of $ 13.69, the Sony reader’s average price was $ 15.26 and the Nook had an astonishing average price of $ 19.29 per book.

Not much evidence of Amazon using their market domination to profit there. In fact, based upon these numbers, if you read a book a week then the Kindle would save you $ 300 a year compared to the Nook. It would pay for itself and still leave you with enough money to buy a few books.

It’s difficult to see the Amazon Kindle reader winding up as the Betamax of e-book readers. However, it may be that the most important discussions at this time will be those taking place between the major publishing houses and the e-book retailers. Only when some agreement on pricing policy is reached will it makes sense to thrash out some agreement on an industry standard e-book format.

Check out the Amazon Kindle for yourself and view the wide range of Kindle accessories available to help you personalise your reader.