[poll=38]I’ve been taking a second look at commercial e-books, in light of the comments I’ve read on the Amazon Kindle and other reading devices, both E Ink and not. DRM remains a concern to me. It might seem like nothing to pay $4 for a digital version of a fairly disposal paperback best-seller.
I typically pay $8-9 for the paperback p-book, read it, sell it back to a used bookstore for three or four dollars and come out about at par with what I would be paying for an e-version. But the main reason I don’t keep every p-book is a lack of storage space. With e-books, where that is not as much of an issue, I would hesitate to throw away something I had paid for, and I may be more inclined to keep that Nora Roberts best-seller. $4 times one book a month is around $50 a year, and that starts to add up to real money. I would hate to have it all go to waste just because the tech industry finally standardizes digital formats down the road and sends “Secure eReader” the way of the digital dinosaur!
Waiting and seeing—and pondering the cost per book, just to read a freebie
So, for the time being, anyway, I am waiting and seeing. I may make the occasional impulse buy, but there is such a quantity of free stuff out there that I still have a lot to work through. And there is an economic factor to this reading too: the books may not cost me anything, but the readers do. So, how much have I paid for my techie inclinations over the last few years?
What is my average cost per book just to read a freebie? I did some math, and found the results surprisingly satisfying. I started with a list of free e-books I had put together some time ago, or Project Gutenberg titles which interested me. I had begun my e-reading habit by choosing titles from it, and it is a list I still turn to when choosing new downloads. I crossed off the books I was sure I had not read yet, and for the purposes of a pure experiment, crossed off the ones I was unsure about.
Some of the titles I recalled from my university days, but the specifics in many cases were a little hazy. Possibly, I read it years ago.
Tagged in del.icio.us
Possibly, I had just heard so much about it that I thought I did. Either way, I left those off for now. The remainder, I tagged in del.icio.us for safe-keeping and future statistics-compiling. Then, I added up the cost of my e-devices. I had a Palm Pilot back in the day. It broke, and I bought another. Both were used e-bay finds. My current e-reader is my Alphasmart Dana, also an eBay find.
So, rounding a little, this gives me a tech cost of $200. Divide that by the 48 e-books in my little log, and you get an approximate cost of $4.16 per book. That doesn’t even include the hours of usage I get out of these devices for other purposes! And it is certainly on par with trolling a used bookstore, renting a video or other forms of disposable entertainment.
Now that I have a more comfortable reader with a bigger-than-Palm screen, my e-book reading has gone way up. When I clear 90 e-books, my cost per book will fall below $2 a title. 180, and I’ll be below a dollar. Over 200, and I’ll be getting into negative numbers. Now, throw in a basic dedicated device like an ebookwise, at $150 a pop. Even if you only factor in the 50-odd books I have read so far, the cost of that device will still put my e-book reading in the comfortable range of about $6.50 per book. Double it to factor in the books I read before I started tracking them, and you’re at just over $3 each, even factoring in the cost of that additional gizmo.
Slashable to $1 a book?
This little lesson in economics was educational indeed. I think it may even push me over the line into finally buying a dedicated e-gizmo. Fun as the Dana is, its screen is a little shiny for dedicated reading. I’m considering throwing an eBookwise into the mix, and loading it up with public-domain titles. On a comfortable device, a voracious reader like me can easily get the cost down to $1 a book.
Glad you hit on the storage costs of pBooks. Although books don’t seem big, I know they take up an appreciable fraction of the floor space (and volume) of my house. I suspect this is true of most readers.
You’ll have to send us the address of the used bookstore where you can get $3-4 for a used paperback. My local used bookstore pays more like 3-4 cents.
I hope, once you buy the eBookWise, you’ll look beyond free and into the low cost books available from Fictionwise/eBookWise.
Good luck.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
I am curious where you pay 4$ for an e-book, especially for print bestsellers. By and large the lowest price I saw for books released as a mmpb by mainstream publishers at 6.99$ is 5.59$ as an e-book, wile for 7.99$ ones, the e-book price is somewhat higher too.
For hardcovers the online print price is again close to the e-book price (17$ against 15$) unless you have the Kindle where the price drops to 10$. But if you read a lot and do not rush to buy something immediate after publication, it’s easy to get hc books at far lower prices including shipping as “used” (though most are new or almost new) not much later, usually before the mmpb release.
The monetary savings are not there the way presented above. Of course if you go to non-commercial books than it’s a different story.
As mentioned in another post, there are many reasons to buy a device to read e-books on (space, convenience, monetary savings if you go the non-commercial route), monetary savings buying commercial e-books is just not there
The same way with an iPod, you do not buy it to save money on music bought at iTunes vs a music store; you buy it for many other reasons first.
Ebk1150 is a nice device, fast, best ergonomics out there, and I’ve enjoyed it the year or so I’ve used it before my 770, but the screen is out-dated, once you see a modern device (lcd like Nokia 700-800, iTouch, UMPC, or eink like Sony, Kindle), you will realize you want something else.
Rob, is the p-book is a current best-seller, my local used bookstore will pay just short of half the cover price.
As for the cost of ebooks, I would never get one that is in the $20 range. That type of book, if it’s one I would buy, is probably a cookbook or fitness book and in that case, I would want the p-version. I do not buy fiction or non-fiction at that price, I get it from the library. Fictionwise does have some current paperback bestsellers that have rebates on them wen you buy. If you already have their member discount, and buy when the rebate is fresh, you can get them for about $5 a book. In spite of my anti-DRM inclinations, that is still a decent price when you consider than in e-form, I would keep it and in p-form, I would but for $10 and sell for $4, leaving $6 I spent just for the privilege of reading. I guess that if ereader ever goes the way of the dodo and all these theoretical purchases of mine become unreadable, I would have to chalk it up to ‘rental fees’ or something. I would still rather just rent the book in the first place, either via a well-designed public library interface, or some sort of Netflix for ebooks type of arrangement where you pay, say, $2 a book for any best-seller you want, and it expires after 30 days. As I had said in previous posts, I am fine with DRM-as-rental-model scenarios. I just don’t want DRM on something I pay to ‘own.’
I have sent ebookwise a few questions about working with a Mac. I am waiting for the replies and then I will make a decision about purchasing. I look forward to reading any more comments on this. I am really interested in all the issues this blog covers!
>>>The same way with an iPod, you do not buy it to save money on music bought at iTunes vs a music store; you buy it for many other reasons first.
It’s interesting that you bring up the iPod. I’ve never seen, in all my years reading online about MP3 players, anyone go through the cost-justification routine that people seem to do with e-readers. I’ve never seen anyone, for instance, say, “Well, I’ve already paid X for all this music I have on CD. Now what’s the *true* cost of that for the time it will take me to rip it (properly) to MP3 and then add to that the cost of the iPod…?” People just tend to *buy* the things, economics be damned. No one sits down and granularly prices their music cost (which, with music, they could additionally factor in the X of repeated listens to really drive down the price!).
>>>I do not buy fiction or non-fiction at that price, I get it from the library.
Hmmm… can the e-reader you’re considering handle the MobiPocket or Adobe epub/PDF DRMed Overdrive formats from public libraries? (First, does your local library even offer that? Mine does.)
I bought a Kindle and have read quite a few e-books on my Palm as well. Although the Kindle is on the high end dollar wise, I wanted the LARGE TEXT. I cannot get that in a p-book most of the time. I am now passing the 3/4 century mark and don’t expect my vision to get any better. With the recent degradation of Coloidal Melanoma, my vision has degraded even farther. So mark the cost of the Kindle off to “medical expenses” and e-books are really reasonable in price. My point? We don’t all buy the e-reader just to save money on our books.
Regarding the comment above about music, I completely agree with it. To me trying to justify buying an e-book reading device based on saving money on commercial e-books vs print books is a more of “let’s find a justification for” argument than a serious one.
People arrive at e-books for their own reasons (originally my reasons were portability and ability to read in the dark), and when they do, they will get the device best fit for their needs irrespective of any arguments like the one above.
I disagree with the comment about music, because music has always been something that you needed to buy a device to play—from the record player to the tape deck to the cd player to the ipod, you have always needed to buy the music PLUS a player/ Ebooks are different because you could go to a bookstore and buy a bok and just read it, no machines required. The two are not a good comparison.
>>>I disagree with the comment about music, because music has always been something that you needed to buy a device to play—from the record player to the tape deck to the cd player to the ipod, you have always needed to buy the music PLUS a player/ Ebooks are different because you could go to a bookstore and buy a bok and just read it, no machines required. The two are not a good comparison.
Into the WABAC Machine, Sherman, where we see Mr & Mrs Carnegie debating the finer points of getting one of those strange gramophones:
He: But look at the cost, dear! Why, that’s the price of ten concerts a year! And we don’t attend ten concerts a year.
She: Think of the convenience. We can have music any time!
He: Then we will have to buy those disks for it too. Think of that expense too. Why, at some point I can forsee the expense being so much that we could have just hired a band! And since we live in several homes during the year, we’ll either have to carry all of that or — buy duplicates!
And so it goes…
Ficbot,
The eBookwise will work with a Mac. I have one and it works well. The big difference is with a Mac you must use the web based content converter/uploader to convert and upload your free ebooks.
p-Book storage is the biggest reason I started reading ebooks years ago. I much prefer to have my fiction books in ebook format that take up no space.
Brad, my understanding was that there was a 10 mb cap on using the personal content server. I guess if it is my own content, I would have a backup on the pc. So I would not *need* more than 10 mb at a time, per se. But I am curious how many books you could fit on 10 mb. Also I was wondering if Fictionwise purchases counted in the 10 mb personal server cap or not. I emailed fictionwise support 3 days ago and have not heard back yet.
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