Amazon’s clearly stated policy of setting the price of Kindle books at $ 9.99 or less has led to some tough discussions with the major publishing houses. Recently, this even resulted in the brief removal of books by publishing giant McMillan from the Amazon website. McMillan books are now being sold on the Amazon site, and they may have managed to secure more favourable pricing for their books – in the short term at least – but the large publishing houses need to take care.
The Kindle reader is now Amazon’s top selling product, a fact which shows just how quickly public have become accustomed to e-book readers. Additional to the Kindle, there are now plenty of other readers available from different companies, such as Apple, Plastic Logic, Sony, Barnes and Noble etc. The market is still relatively new, and is still evolving and developing, but it is growing extremely quickly.
At the moment, the owners of e-book readers are in the minority – and this situation will probably continue for some time to come – but already they have begun to form a very important segment within the industry. After all, people who read a book a month are probably not going to buy an e-book reader. E-book reader owners are the type of people who read a lot of books.
They are likely to have a fairly high disposable income level – or else how would they manage to spend more than $200 on a discretionary item like an e-book reader? There are probably fairly well educated, they are certainly well read, and they are likely to be well-informed and to keep up to date with topical items. Put it another way, they are the target demographic for booksellers and publishers.
They will certainly be aware of the fact that it costs very much less to produce an e-book than it does to produce a traditional hardback or paperback volume. They will probably be aware of the fact that e-books are better for the environment – even when the materials used to produce the reader hardware are taken into account. They probably enjoy the speed and ease of purchasing books for their readers – a lot of them might even buy more books because of this. They are, most likely, in love with reading rather than in love with books. When they are reading an enjoyable book, they probably wouldn’t be aware if they are using as Sony PRS, an Amazon Kindle, or leafing through a handsome leather bound first edition (a proper book if you like). It would be foolish for any of the big publishing houses overlook these early adopters of the latest reading technology.
But that’s exactly what many publishers are in danger of doing right now. The major publishing houses are, understandably perhaps, keen to protect the profits from hardback edition sales. Hence the reason that they have pressurised book retailers like Amazon to increase the price of e-books. Whilst this may be a successful strategy in the short term, there is very little logic behind it other than to protect the profits of the publishers. The publishers are in danger of making themselves look bad in the eyes of some of their most important customers – which can only result in one thing, less custom and lower sales volumes.
Check out the Kindle reader and view the wide range of Kindle accessories available to help you customise and protect your reader.
