The price (still) isn't right

The Kindle has been big in the states and its key advantages over the Sony appear to be a better user-interface and the ability to download e-books wirelessly. The key disadvantage is that, like the Kindle itself, you can only get your books from Amazon in a particular format that the Kindle uses.

There may be many cultural differences between the UK and the US, and I wonder if our book-buying and reading habits are among those differences. The points I made in the past are still true - so what if these devices allow you to carry 200 books at any one time, I'd imagine the most that any of us can read at one time is 2-3.

Amazon & Sony may have some success with students and this product - students who need to have many books for research and can highlight/save relevant passages, make notes, etc. Those are useful functions but with prices at around £200 perhaps it's not for the student market?

I imagine my book-buying habits are similar to many people who read a lot - I rarely buy anything in hardback, nearly all my books are bought in promotions (3 for 2, buy one get one half-price) and others are picked up in charity shops for as little as 25p.

I like the idea of an e-reader but I don't much like the price of them. Assuming that all my 'top-priced' books average at around £8 the reader is priced at the value of 25 books, about 9 months worth of reading.

Then there's the price of the e-books themselves, and this is where I really start to lose it. The way I see it is: if I'm buying a downloaded book then I'm paying the author for their words and the publisher for advancing the author the money to write, and probably a bit of marketing and a bit of retailer percentage. What I'm not paying for is anything physical like printed pages and covers and the manufacturing and transportation of such.

On that basis it baffles me why an e-book should be anywhere near the price of a physical book. An e-book is electronically transmitted to me, it's no more than a long e-mail, there's no physical cost involved. I can't pass it on when I've finished with it, I can't throw it at my kids when they're annoying me - so why does an e-book cost as much as a printed book?

As much as I love Amazon, and I do - I suspect my first ever internet purchase was from them - I don't want to be tied to them, I want the freedom to look around; to be able to buy my stuff from other retailers. What I particularly hate to discover is enormous and foolish disparities in prices between physical and electronic - such as the price on Amazon for Stieg Larsson's 'Girl With The Dragon Tattoo'. The paperback costs £3.99 but the electronic version, £8.68. Insanity.

The same disparities exist in music, frequently you'll find that the CD version of an album and the mp3 download are either very similar or so close that it makes no real sense. In those instances the physical product wins every time, it's just more flexible and it's something you own - rather than something that might be lost if your hard disc fails and your ipod dies.

The price of music has been coming down over the last few years, but only the price of physical product - the digital story remains the same and suitably stagnant. Streaming is the future of music and renting from digital libraries may be the future of books - for publishing to be this far behind the music industry, particularly when the music industry moves like a one-legged sloth, is stupid.

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