Comments on: What’s wrong with this picture?

By: dingus

dingus — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 20:14:32 +0000

step 1: printer prints a whole lot of books
step 2: printer fails to sell a whole lot of books
step 3: printer has thousands of copies of books lying around everywhere for years
step 4: printer avoids throwing them away by selling e-book version for more than paper, inducing people to buy the dormant paper books.

no trees were lost in this experiment.

By: Raymond Harrison

Raymond Harrison — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 16:21:26 +0000

Just a matter of time before the Kindle edition hits $20.00 or more, especially when these books are no longer being printed.

What is to stop the price from rising? If there are no print alternatives, what will stop you from buying? Perhaps the Digital Library of America, but there is no money to be made on that venture.

Perhaps we will all be subscribers to NetBooks. You can borrow two digital books at once for $13.99 per month. You can borrow as many books per month as you wish but only two at a time. Or you can pay $49.99 per month for the NetBooks unlimited plan.

NetBooks is a registered trademark and my copyrighted idea; so I will receive royalties on every book loaned!

By: Jonathan Peterson

Jonathan Peterson — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 14:06:42 +0000

And that in a nutshell is why I won’t buy a kindle. Pay more, get less.

By: Daniel Beaver-Seitz

Daniel Beaver-Seitz — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 13:57:38 +0000

It shouldn’t happen, but it does highlight that ebook devices offer a value beyond the availability of cheaper books, namely that it’s easier to carry a library of ebooks around than a library of physical books, as well as other affordances, such as a built-in dictionary.

It also points to a problem that Amazon has to confront: if they’re trying to sell down their stock of a physical editions of a book (although they assure us they’re not in this case), the Kindle edition price isn’t necessarily a workable lower boundary for a clearance price, especially given that publishers/authors set Kindle prices and Amazon sets the prices for physical books.

By: DC Stultz

DC Stultz — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 09:20:06 +0000

Yeah, it happens a lot. And I refuse to pay more than $10 for the Kindle version. Since I have their Prime account with “free” 2nd day air shipping, I just order the book even though everyone — author, publisher, Amazon — loses. Not to mention the loss of trees.