Not to mention, you will read it faster and remember more of it when reading it off Newsprint or the Kindle rather than reading off your LCD.

Where’s the Department of Education?! Why aren’t we getting our money’s worth out of it? Why isn’t there a national initiative to switch students over to ebooks? Given the humongous market, reader prices could plummet.

In fact, it doesn’t even take *our* government to do this. What about all those governments looking at the OLPC? (I guess, for them, the XO would *be* the ebook reader…)

For me to get the gray lady delivered to my door costs $6.40/week, or $333/year. Now a Kindle subscription that is pushed to my Kindle every morning is $14/month, or $168/year. That’s $165 in savings every year (not to mention the benefits to the planet of not printing that news paper, and not physically distributing it)

That said, if we want to expand into the broader market of people who are occasional readers, and if we want to encourage people who haven’t tried eBooks, we need a price point that people can accept without swallowing hard–or a way of cost-justifying the expense. That’s one of the appeals of the multifunction device–that the justification can be spread over multiple applications (swiss army knife problems notwithstanding). Actually, with its web browser, the Kindle might come close to being a multifunction device. You’ll note that my little analysis didn’t put any value on the web aspects of the machine. That’s through not having seen it in action so I can’t get a feel for it. Also, it’ll be interesting to see if Amazon really can keep the cost of web browsing at free.

Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com

I buy many of my books from Amazon. Often I can store up an order of 3 or more and split the shipping costs, but that can still easily add $5-6 per book bought. If I’m in a rush for one book, the cost of shipping can be more than the price of the book, adding more than 100% to the cost.

eBook purchases would get around both problems, the shipping cost and the shipping delay in getting stuck into reading it.

I’d like to see that analysis, using some real data, like people’s real book buying history (Amazon will have all the data and shipping options chosen and costs, etc for the on-line purchases).

Well, if I understand Rob’s analysis, the market for the Kindle is really book geeks like the sorts of folks who post to Teleread! For me, the marginal value of having a lightweight device that holds 5,000 books on an SD card all instantly searchable is far greater than $400.

And you simply route around the DRM damage by using sources like Baen, etc. and converting them to non-DRMed Mobipocket.

The Kindle and the Sony Reader and Cybook are exactly where the iPod was when it was first released. Way too expensive, no color screen, and not a whole lot of features. I can’t imagine anyone but early adopters and book geeks being satisfied with the existing range of choices for ebook readers. They all have significant gotchas.

Free is an important additional benefit for many of us. I certainly enjoy the Baen Free Library, and have found a number of books I’ve enjoyed on Gutenberg and on Manybooks.net. Similarly, not free but important, you can buy books significantly cheaper from Baen and many small publishers, even leaving aside the Kindle discount, than the paper versions of the same. On the other hand, many people don’t read public domain books and wouldn’t put any value. Each reader will have to do the same. Absolutely agree that the paper resale value is a non-issue but as I think David pointed out several months ago when I said the same thing, it’s something that perennially gets listed as a disadvantage of eBooks. As far as the book-a-month reader being a heavy reader, I think David had some scary statistics on reading in the US several months ago. Yep, a book a month is way above average. And remember, the average includes the book-a-day romance reader who generally buys paperback and would save only a few pennies by buying e instead.

Liviu, I’m an economist so I tend to think of everything in economic terms. It’s a job hazard. That said, ultimately people are going to make the switch to eBooks because eBooks provide benefits to them. Some of these benefits may be pure cost savings in acquisition (which is what I’ve modeled). Some of these benefits may be lifestyle (being able to read where you are, carry less weight on trips, instant gratification, not having to buy bookshelves). I would argue that all of these can be quantified economically. Again, that’s the benefit/detriment of the kind of training anyone with a PhD in economics gets. What’s the joke about to a kid with a hammer, everything looks like a nail?

I want a UMPC, too. I think they’re cute beyond words. That I don’t buy at $2000 but would in a second at $200 says something about value, don’t you think?

Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com

I haven’t found enough books at the library to justify the initial outlay, but it’s getting close (at least for the Cybook).

I bought specifically for e-books, in order, an Ebk1150, a Nokia 770 at full price when it launched, a used tablet, a Sony with the discount, and more recently an iTouch for pdf’s, and while eink has been a bust for me being too slow, I love my 770 and iTouch, the Ebk found a loving home overseas since my father in law loved it when he visited and the tablet is useful for this and that.

If a UMPC gets at a reasonable price for me (under 400$ – either the Samsung or the Raon will do), I will buy one such immediately, but I would not justify any purchase on economic grounds.

At mobileread, I’ve come across a ton of Sony Reader-formatted books that I’d *love* to read. None of these are currently in print. Trying to get them in print versions — used market, of course — could be pricey. Even being conservative, I think it’d cost about $200 to assemble the collection in print that I’ve gotten for FREE.

So half of a Reader’s price would already be covered for me.

And then… what if I decide to go mad, due to impatience, and start ripping apart and scanning some print books I have (which are, again, all out of print)? I could easily wring the remaining $200 out of that.

Others mention being able to re-sell their books. I find that weirder than a-book-a-month being used to define “heavy reading.” Books I get I tend to hang onto. Free preview is what the public library is for.

And yep, if I could read borrowed NYPL epubs on a Sony Reader, my god, I’d amortize the cost in about 3 months just from that use alone!

Sadly, people who read a book a month are ‘heavy readers,’ at least statistically.

Liviu, you’re absolutely right that many heavy readers don’t concentrate on best-sellers. For non-best-sellers, Amazon still offers significant savings for Kindle editions, which means that there would be a payback period but we’d have to develop a model ‘heavy reader’ and create a reading mix. Of course, heavy readers do read some best-sellers, and right now, that’s where the big discounts exist.

David/whey, I don’t know about you guys, but my local Half Priced Books pays less than a dollar for a new hardback (and almost nothing for paperbacks). But yes, if you resold your books, that would make the Kindle payback a tiny bit harder to justify.

Liviu, you’re absolutely right that the Kindle plan includes a lock-in to Kindle. If you want to switch to a non-Kindle-compatible reader in the future, you might have a hard time re-reading your books. We could model this–figure what percentage of books a heavy reader wants to read more than two years after he/she initially purchases them and then subtract a discounted value for this loss, minus the percentage of readers who’d want to buy a new Kindle anyway and wouldn’t have the loss.

Although I ignored discount rates in my first post, you do have to remember that being able to re-read a book ten years from now has a pretty insignificant discounted present value.

Also, I ignored the benefit of not having to store paper books, cart them around with you when you move, etc. For an increasingly mobile population, these benefits can be significant.

Obviously the model is simplified. I think it does call attention to the kind of reader who’d find the Kindle highly attractive–people who read lots of best-sellers.

Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com