To celebrate the arrival of my new Kindle (I sold my first-gen model for $270 on Amazon last week), here are a bunch of articles about e-book pricing and why publishers are scared crapless by the example of Apple and iTunes:
- Kassia Kroszer, who writes wonderfully about this stuff on her blog, argues that $9.99 is tops for what consumers will pay. I agree, as there are a number of Kindle books that I’ve blown off because they’re priced above that, including the new translation of War & Peace (which I finally bought a minute ago after the price dropped from $22+ to $8.96).
- Here’s an interview with Ms. Kroszer!
- Here’s a publisher at HarpersStudio explaining why paper, printing and binding (PPB) only account for about $2.00 of a book’s price, and therefore why Kindle books need to cost a lot more than $10. It looks like he doesn’t account for bookstore returns in that estimate; overprinting and getting stuck with tons of unsold copies doesn’t occur with an e-verison, of course. And he may be lying.
- This guy disagrees with that guy.
- Jason Epstein still wants a high-speed machine that will make print copies of books on demand. No, seriously. Oh, and good books will be written by demented shut-ins “highly specialized individuals struggling at their desks in deep seclusion and not by linked communities of interest.”
I’m gonna go read something now.
