I have recently (in the last few days) picked up a Sony eBook reader, but I have also been reading ebooks for quite a while on various mobile phones. As an avid book reader, I have the classic problem of where to keep all my books. Books take up space, and sooner or later you realise that they take up an inconveniently large amount of space.
Sometimes I think that eBooks are the solution and sometimes I think they’re not quite there yet. The Sony reader has a few rough edges; in particular the irritating screen refresh (I don’t mind it being slow, but the flicker as it redraws is irritating) and the page turn buttons being slightly awkward.
But the price of ebooks themselves is somewhat ridiculous. In particular with a DRM-protected format, which means no guarantee that you will be able to read them on future devices … I have books several times older than myself, and I somehow doubt that “LRX” format books will be readable in a hundred years. For those who aren’t aware it seems that the prices for LRX books is between about £6 and £15 (and probably more).
Of course authors and publishers deserve a fair return on their investment in producing a book, but is pricing ebooks at roughly the cost of a physical book sensible ? I am thinking of replacing some 750 books with ebook equivalents which amounts to a cost of around £5,000 for something I already own!
No thanks.
And after all, not producing physical books and then shipping then around would be a huge cost saving so why isn’t that saving being passed on ? It comes across as the classic ripoff to most consumers.
Ebooks should be much cheaper than the physical books which would also have the advantage of bringing the cost down to a level where people will be more likely to make impulse buys. This would probably increase sales to the point where the cost cutting would have a negligable effect on the profitability.
Why not give free copies of ebooks away to those who purchase a physical book ? This would also popularise the ebook method. If I had “coupons” from all the physical books I had purchased this year, I would probably have bought an eReader much sooner.