Price of e-Books: The Biggest Enemy?

Since they became popular, mostly thanks to the e-Paper readers such as Sony Readers and Amazon's Kindle, e-Books have had three major enemies: DRM (digital rights management), geographic restrictions and high prices.

Readers have always given out about DRM and Geo-restrictions. They don't make sense and they are, at best, frustrating for the reader. I've always believed that the high prices have constituted a lesser threat to the success of the e-Books. This is because I think that as e-Readers become more popular, a reasonable and more-or-less global pricing scheme will set in. I'm not so sure about it anymore.

Amazon's $9.99 upper limit was an excellent start in the US. However publishers have never been happy about this artificial price limit. I guess they never liked the fact that e-Book sales have cannibalized their hardback sales, which is where they mostly make their money (please correct me if I'm wrong on this one. I've always assumed so with my limited knowledge).

Amazon's recent failure in its arm-wrestle with Macmillan and authors' joining the clash were the first indicators of Amazon's defeat not only in this fight but in this war. Not surprisingly, Amazon is also cornered by increasing competition, especially the new Apple gadget, iPad.

There's no doubt, at least in my mind, that electronic content is the future of reading. At the end of the day, I think most of the e-Reader users are happy to absorb some of the device cost because of the convenience of using such gadgets. However, ultimately, they believe that e-Books have to be commercialized considerably cheaper than their dead-tree editions. I'm just hoping that the time we'll see a general consensus about how much an e-Book should cost is not so far away.

Kindle International Edition

It had been rumored for a while and today came the official announcement: Ladies and gents! Amazon Kindle 2 is now internationally available in 100+ countries (but bizarrely not in Canada - anybody knows why?).

As of today, you can pre-order it from the co.uk site for $279 and Amazon will begin shipping them on 19th October. Even though the device is current sold from the .com site, a UK store is forthcoming. Currently the list of UK publishers whose books are available to Kindle 2 users include Atlantic Books, Bloomsbury, Canongate, Faber & Faber, Hachette, Harlequin, HarperCollins, Lonely Planet, Penguin, Profile Books, Quercus, Simon & Schuster and Wiley. It looks like the talks between Amazon and Random House are ongoing so Random House is not currently on the list. The number of available titles is supposed to be more than 250.000.

According to The Register, the Kindle international edition seems to be using GSM technology only. If this is true, the Kindle International may not be working everywhere in the world. Furthermore, the UK coverage map resembles 3's network, even though the operator denied having an agreement with Amazon.

What's this fee of $1.99 per book about?

Since the announcement, there has been a big debate about the international prices, especially about the $1.99 that the international users are supposed to pay per book downloaded. It turns out that this fee is payed only by the US Kindle users buying books outside the USA. International users won't pay that fee even if they use their Kindles outside their registered countries. I'm sure, that's precisely the reason why the international titles' prices will range between $11.99 and $13.99 rather than %9.99 like in the US. It looks like the extra fee is bundled with the book price for the non-US customers already.

As you can guess, it was all about releasing the Kindle 2 well before the holiday season. Q4 has always been the busiest quarter for Amazon so they wanted release the device early in October. Is that a half-baked solution? Will there be a lot of confusion about where to buy it and for how much? We'll see it pretty soon. In the meantime, competition is good for us, the consumers. I believe Sony's e-readers are better devices but we'll see if Amazon can break Sony's market dominance outside the US.