Comments on: Kindle e-book pricing: Is Amazon ripping off Mobipocket customers, especially outside the States? And also trying too hard to herd Americans toward the Kindle?

By: Break-down of e-book Prices on Amazon kindle store

Break-down of e-book Prices on Amazon kindle store — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 05:42:49 +0000

[...] on amazon. If you compare the prices of e-books on mobipocket.com, which is owned by amazon, such anomaly is even severe. In any way, here is the break-down of percentage of e-books by price brackets available from [...]

By: Alan Wallcraft

Alan Wallcraft — Fri, 22 May 2009 11:05:15 +0000

Tony: These appear to be TOPAZ ebooks, which are specific to the Kindle and are created by Amazon using a scan and OCR process. Many standard ebooks are generated from paper copies, but what is unique about TOPAZ is that it actually has bitmaps of the scanned fonts in the document.

My description of TOPAZ may not be exactly correct, because no one outside Amazon knows the details. We also don’t know how many TOPAZ ebooks there are, although for fiction it is probably less than 1% of the total. The bottom line is that TOPAZ ebooks are usually very poor quality, but on the other hand the alternative is no ebook at all.

I have one TOPAZ ebook that is no longer available because it has been replaced by a standard MOBI/AZW. So ebooks can come back from TOPAZ purgatory. I don’t get a free upgrade to the AZW version by the way. The TOPAZ is still available to those who bought it, just not to new customers.

By: Tony Rabig

Tony Rabig — Fri, 22 May 2009 00:34:05 +0000

What I find more interesting than prices, and not nearly as frequently commented upon, is the number of books that appear to be exclusive to the Kindle. Check out listings at MobiPocket or Fictionwise or Books on Board for William Goldman, Stewart O’Nan, P.J. O’Rourke, Thomas Sowell, & Ramsey Campbell. Each of these writers has titles out there as ebooks, but a number of them are available only on the Kindle. Check some other writers for yourself & I’ll bet that you’ll soon find a number of ebooks on Kindle that you don’t find elsewhere.

Anyone know why publishers would go for that notion — Kindle only ebook releases — rather than having their books available on a larger number of platforms in a wider market? Or are there publishers out there who think that ebook=Kindle, and won’t that make it even easier for Amazon to rule the ebook market by and by?

Bests to all,

–tr

By: Break-down of e-book Prices on Amazon kindle store | e-bookvine's Kindle Board

Thu, 21 May 2009 23:47:10 +0000

[...] The pricing of e-books has recently become an important issue of discussion. Over amazon’s kindle forum, readers are trying to pursue others to ‘boycott anything over $9.99‘. In one of my recent posts I have already discussed on some concerns regarding amazon’s pricing anomaly. What should be the optimal price of a standard e-book? Should it be half of the hardcover, half of the softcover, or even lower than that? I definitely believe that the price of an e-book must be always lower than any other formats; but in reality, that’s not the case. A lot of people discovered that some e-books are priced even higher than the softcover on amazon. If you compare the prices of e-books on mobipocket.com, which is owned by amazon, such anomaly is even severe. [...]

By: HarryT

HarryT — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 07:53:57 +0000

The reason MobiPocket.com’s prices are higher is simple – they are primarily a WHOLESALER of books, and so they sell eBooks at “list price” to avoid undercutting their many retails. To do a fair comparison, don’t compare the price of books at the Kindle store and MobiPocket, compare between the Kindle store and a MobiPocket retailer such as Fictionwise. That would be a fair comparison. This is just meaningless.

By: Paul Biba

Paul Biba — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 22:37:58 +0000

Somehow I posted the comment without the percentages. I’ll try again:

Double Cross 42%
The Choice 32%
Stone Cold 39%
A Thousand Splendid Suns 20%
World Without End 67%
Book of the Dead 57%
Protect and Defend 32%
An Inconvenient Book 32%
I am America 39%
Boom 36%
Good Dog. Stay 10%
God is Not Great 15%
Clapton 36%
Age of Turbulence 67%
The Kite Runner 15%
Halo: Contact Harvest – couldn’t find it
The Road 10%
No Country for Old Men 100%
Memory Keeper’s Daughter 15%
The Emperor’s Children 15%

Life is getting compicated

By: Paul Biba

Paul Biba — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 22:32:29 +0000

This is all making buying ebooks more interesting. I usually buy from Fictionwise, so I thought I’d take Humayan’s list and see how it worked out over there.

First, Fictionwise’s list prices are all the same as Mobipocket’s prices. However, Fictionwise is giving discounts by crediting the purchaser’s Micropay account. For those of you who are not familiar with this, you set up an account with your credit card which you “fund” with however much money you want. When you buy a book you can either pay for it, or you can have the price taken out of your Micropay account. Here is the listing of Humayan’s books and the percentage discount that Fictionwise is giving the buyer by adding that percentage to the buyer’s Micropay account. The percentage is off the “list” price, which, as I mentioned, is the same as the Mobipocket price:

Double Cross

By: Michael Ward

Michael Ward — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 22:17:58 +0000

I’d expect Amazon’s prices for Kindle books to go up a bit in January, once the initial selling push is over. They will probably continue to offer a discount from list price; that’s standard Amazon practice for printed books.

By: Alan Wallcraft

Alan Wallcraft — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 19:53:38 +0000

The Kindle software can read DRMed MOBI e-books, but Amazon has chosen to disallow this option. This is a marketing decision, that could be changed tomorrow (or never). It is particularly onerous because there are many library e-books in MobiPocket format, and none of them can be read on the Kindle.

I suppose mobipocket.com is the obvious place to look for MobiPocket books, but it is almost never the cheapest option. There are plenty of sites offering at least some discount off of MobiPocket’s list price.

I think it is more likely that the selling price of the Kindle itself includes a markup that allows a profit even when selling some e-books below cost. The e-books are loss leaders that encourage the buying of the high-margin Kindle.

By: Rob Preece

Rob Preece — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 19:15:01 +0000

I’m not sure the assumption that Amazon is cutting special deals with publishers for the Kindle is correct. I believe that most, if not all, of Kindle’s books come from MobiPocket, where publishers already have contracts and no special deals are required.

With MobiPocket direct, prices are what the publisher states as the list price (less any special discounts the publisher determines). But MobiPocket retailers are not required to charge MobiPocket’s prices. They can charge whatever they want. Of course, if they charge too little, they’ll lose money on the deal. It seems to me that Amazon is treating Kindle as a special form of MobiPocket retailers.

I certainly haven’t cut any special deals with Amazon, but I note that Kindle offers BooksForABuck.com books at below our list price (in general, it’s the cheapest place on the net to buy our books, including BooksForABuck.com itself (once our introductory pricing is over) but there’s the thing. If they sell one of our books, under our existing contract, MobiPocket treats it as a sale and we get the full 50% of list that we’d be due if it sold from Mobipocket. The retailer, in this case Amazon, eats the difference. (By the way, Amazon does something similar with paper books. Publishers set a price. Amazon sets its payout (only 45% of list if you’re a small publisher–ouch) but Amazon may sell for less than list–it’s payout to publishers won’t be cut just because it choses to price at below list).

I’m not sure Amazon will maintain this Kindle discount pricing structure forever and would advise any potential Kindle buyer not to assume that Amazon will forever offer prices that result in it losing money on best-seller books. This isn’t to say they won’t, just that I don’t think they promise they will.

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

By: Robert Nagle

Robert Nagle — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 19:02:53 +0000

One thing unmentioned is that unencrypted mobipocket could still be sold and distributed for free at any price. Also, my bet is that prices on other mobipocket stores will come down as well eventually.

There are always discrepencies and inequities in pricing; I expect the market to correct that. From a self-publisher’s point of point of view, all I care about is more people will have a device that can read unencrypted mobipocket books. Now, if the kindle didn’t have an SD slot, that would be another matter.

Why should the consumer care that Amazon is cutting deals with publishers to bring lower prices? So they intend to raise the price later? That’s standard business practice.

One thing I haven’t seen an analysis of is how well Kindle reads mobipocket files. If there are other compatibilities, that would be a real problem.