They have been one of the retail sensations of the Christmas season. Sales of eReaders, the handheld devices on to which electronic books can be downloaded, rocketed through December.
It is good news for makers such as Amazon, which produces the best- selling Kindle and collects 30 per cent of the price of downloaded books.
But there are fears that their profits could be hit by a the sheer number of pirate eBooks available to download for free.
Just as pirates and websites including Napster undermined the music industry by putting music on the web for free, so the same is now happening with eBooks.
An agreement between six major publishers including Harper Collins and Penguin also recently saw prices rocket for many ebooks – some of which are more expensive than the paper version.
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Sounds like kind of a catch 22 – they have to charge more to make up for the pirating, but the pirating will increase because they are charging so much.
My view is the publishers are being somewhat greedy and shooting themselves in the foot. An e-book has much lower overhead by eliminating printing costs and distribution. Trying to sell it for the same or more than a standard paper book is just asking for problems. They’ll have to look to the music industry to see how they are handling it. Cheaper, better quality downloads could go a long way to reducing the illegal downloads.
Even still, reading a book on a computer screen just seems wrong to me so I’ll stick to my paperbacks and hardcovers.
I’m also wondering how this is affecting the sale of textbooks. That racket has been going on for years. The cost of your books can be as much as tuition at many universities and colleges. I can remember photocopying a couple of textbooks 20+ yrs ago when I was a starving student because they wanted over $100 for each of them. The publishers would add a couple of pictures and make a few minor changes so they could call it a new edition and prevent people from taking advantage of used textbooks.
It’s the net Brian. If there’s a buck to be made people will do what people do.
I got a Kindle for Xmas — still trying to figure out how to work it but in no hurry. As I noted a few days ago somewhere, Amazon is giving these things away at cost. Bad move.