Entertainment For Lively Minds
The economics of Kindle
Since loads of us have Kindles and everybody else has an opinion on them I thought I would share this link http://www.bigmouthstrikesagain.com/
It is the blog of a writer who writes very honestly about the economics of the book he published electronically. He talks about exactly how many copies he is selling, for how much, and how much he gets for it. Also he shares his thoughts about pricing and his experiments with different pricing.
The most interesting thought, and scary for those of us who have already forked out £90 on a Kindle, is the idea that one day the readers could be given away free - the Jan 10th entry. As he says, we are used to getting £400 phones free if we sign up for a contract so why not get a free Kindle if you sign up for a 2-year subscription to the Word in electronic form?
By the way, I have read his book Coffin Dodgers and really enjoyed it http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00538TRQC especially considering that it only cost 99p. Thoroughly recommend it.
Similarly, Richard Herring has self-published some old stuff of his on Kindle and is describing on his blog how the process worked for him, but not in as much detail.
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John Lanchester made a similar point recently
His full article is available here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n24/john-lanchester/let-us-pay, but this was the bit that stood out for me:
A persuasive looking analysis in the Business Insider put the cost of printing and distributing the New York Times at $644 million, and then added this: ‘a source with knowledge of the real numbers tells us we’re so low in our estimate of the Times’s printing costs that we’re not even in the ballpark.’ Taking the lower figure, that means that New York Times, if it stopped printing a physical edition of the paper, could afford to give every subscriber a free Kindle. Not the bog-standard Kindle, but the one with free global data access. And not just one Kindle, but four Kindles. And not just once, but every year. And that’s using the low estimate for the costs of printing.
The real trick
is going to be persuading people to buy the 2000 books that their Kindle will hold.
2000 books at 1 per day is ~5.5 years of reading, at 1 a week it's ~38.4 years. If you fall as low as 1 per fortnight then you'd better plan on living a very long time.
Personally - I rarely have more than 100 books I'm actively considering reading at any one moment in time.
You can also
use your Kindle to store and play audiobooks (or any other mp3 files).
like
an ipod ?
But less convenient to carry around ?
A lot of Kindle owners
— particularly older readers — won't own things like iPods and smartphones. Some of them won't have computers.
It allows them to buy audiobooks from Audible and be able to listen to them.
Really?
The new, cheap Kindle doesn't have a headphone socket - or can you get an adaptor for the USB port that would run headphones? Sounds unlikely.
Of course, just because a machine can hold 2000 books doesn't mean that you have to fill it.
Exactly
No one really needs a device that holds 2,000 books at a time, but computer memory is so cheap now that the Kindle might as well have that sort of capacity.
Ah, didn't know that
The Kindle with the keyboard still has audio out. I guess that's one reason the new one is cheaper.
But yes, the wholesale price of 4GB Flash memory is probably bugger all.
Is any of this ringing a bell?
A commodity is being replaced by a digital version of the same thing, more easily accessible and at lower prices, but for the most part the copyright on these digital versions is being controlled by one big company who also manufacture an exclusive(ish) device as vehicle for these files.
There's something wrong with the whole thing that I can't quite put my finger on... probably to do with the fact that I'm a printer...