Page 1 of Hardback v Kindle

Just looked at the new Brian Cox book on Amazon

Hardback £10.20
Kindle £11.99

???

Snaps

Every Third Car

And you can sell the book on when you`ve finished



[Google have marked freeimagehosting.net as a hoster of malware, therefore this link has been removed]

Yeah, it`s a bugbear of mine as well.

Note this bit: 


This price was set by the publisher
The publishers have it in their heads that they`re devaluing their products if they price them too low, and they don`t want to let Amazon dominate the ebook market so can choose the prices for different retailers. Which means Amazon usually has a higher price.

In fairness even in the above example the ebook is cheaper.

It`s the VAT that`s the killer.

There is no VAT on paper books, but there is on ebooks as they electronic learning material or something 

The book listed in the first post is £9.99 excluding VAT (as that is all a publisher gets and is the actual selling point).

If the Kindle version was say £10 to us (so slightly cheaper), the excluding VAT point to the publisher would be £8.33 so they would take quite a hit on the prices, even though we would be kicking off about the only 20p cheaper!

Personally for £10.20 hardback I would expect to pay £6-7 for a Kindle version tops.  (Which would be £5-5.80 to the publisher.)



Government in robbing us blind shocker.


www.last.fm/user/1mills

But Mills, think about the marginal cost of selling a hardback copy vs an equivalent ebook.
The costs of printing a book have to be fairly substantial, whereas the ebooks are generally just a file conversion of something they already have.

So yes the VAT makes a difference, but it doesn`t explain it all away completely, for me anyway.

But the conventional version of the book Snaps links to in the first post has an RRP of £20 (also set by the publisher). I`d expect unit costs on a print run of a book to actually be fairly low - only a couple of quid per unit. If Amazon buys stock from the publisher at a substantial discount for bulk (say £7.50 per unit) that means the publisher makes around about a fiver on each book. Normally a book shop would flog the book for the full RRP, pocketing the mark-up from its unit cost. Amazon not only has the clout to get a sizeable discount from the publisher, it also has the turnover to be able to keep its profit margin at a minimum to undercut rivals.

It can`t, of course, bulk buy the Kindle edition because it`s a digital file and they`re only acting as an agent between publisher and purchaser. The Kindle edition doesn`t require manufacturing costs, so the only money the publisher doesn`t pocket is the VAT and the poor bloody writer`s royalties.

J Mark Oates

As I`m not involved in publishing or book retail I have no idea how they arrive at the gross price but the net result is that Mr Cox wilbe staying on the shelf (or in bytes) until the price drops.

Snaps

Every Third Car

Alas this isn`t that unsual. My dad got a Kindell and he says he rarely buys books for it for this exact reason, they aren`t any cheaper than the print versions so there is very little benefit in doing it. :/


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Another point to add to my anti-kindle campaign I believe ;)

`Buying` is not the only option.
Particularly for older classics.

Snaps

Every Third Car