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Originally Posted by mdibella
EBook reader manufacturers should take a lesson from Barbie. The reader itself should be sold at cost because once it's in the customer's hands, the book sales will never end. Right now they're trying to have it both ways, profiting from the reader sales and then charging hardcover prices for the ebooks, and the money they save on printing and shipping is pure profit.
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Trouble is, though, the companies making the devices are (with the single exception of Sony) not the ones selling the books, so there's no real incentive for that. Even with the Sony Reader, it's not "tied" to Sony's content - you can load books from any source onto it. It's not like, say, games consoles which are, generally speaking, sold at a loss because the manufacturer makes the money from selling the games.
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Consumers are not stupid, and unless they are diehard early adopters, they need to see a benefit. At the moment, unless they are avid readers like me, the benefit is not there.
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For me, the benefit is space. I live in a very small house. I've got 15,000 eBooks on an external USB hard disk. There's no way that I could store 15,000 paper books, or even 1,000 for that matter.