E-book readers are very popular these days. A lot of the credit for that must go to the Amazon Kindle of course – but there are plenty of other e-book readers to choose from today. However, even with the greatly increased number of readers available, the Kindle is still the leader of the pack – by a long way.
The e-book reader market – in its commercial format at least – is still very new. This sector may be growing extremely quickly, but it is still in nascent form and in its developmental phase. For example, there is no agreed industry wide standard for the formatting of e-books. Many of the new e-book readers seem to be adopting the ePub format. Amazon’s Kindle has its own proprietary format for Kindle books – and it has attracted a fair bit of criticism for this in the past.
In theory, an industry standard e-book format would allow books to be ported from one e-book reader to another. It would also allow customers more choice when buying e-books. More buying options and a greater degree of choice should be good for customers and tend to produce lower prices. You see the logic.
On the other hand, Amazon certainly have a long pedigree of offering good value in the field of reading – be it hardback, paperback or e-books. Their publicly stated strategy of making Kindle books available for $ 9.99 or less has led to some fairly terse discussions with many of the large publishing houses who are, even now, fighting hard to protect the sale of hardback editions.
A study carried out recently by the New York Times, looked at the average price per book for the Kindle, Nook, and Sony e-book readers. Ten books from the Times best books list of 2009 were selected – five non-fiction and five fiction titles. The price to buy these for each reader was calculated and an average price per book worked out. The Kindle was cheapest with an average price of $13.69. The Sony Daily Edition reader came second with an average of $15.26 per book. The Nook reader was in third place with a rather pricey average of $19.29 per book.
Little evidence of Amazon using their market leading position to profiteer in those numbers. In fact, if you read a book a week then, based on these prices, you would save $300 a year by choosing a Kindle instead of the Nook. Your Kindle reader would pay for itself in 12 months and you would still have a few dollars left over to buy books with.
It’s difficult to imagine that the Amazon Kindle will wind up as the Betamax of the e-book world. Fans of Sony’s daily edition can take that any way they like. It seems likely that, for the moment at least, the main discussion that needs to take place is between the major publishers and e-book retailers. Only when all involved are agreed that the world of reading and publishing has changed will it be appropriate to agree on industry standards.
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