Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
I hate to say this, but I will anyway, NAEB and Sony are in deep shit now.
The price of books and delivery method for the Kindle is going to be a winner. Plus the selection. Face it, Amazon has one the war in less then one day.
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The prices may be introductory only, to gain rapid market share. I have confirmed that the publishers are not giving Amazon different terms than other ebook retailers. That means when they sell a $28 list price ebook for $9.95, they are losing $5 on the sale. And, they may have to be giving Verizon a piece of the action, I can't imagine verizon giving away lifetime EVDO service for just a one time slice of the hardware revenue.
The bottom line: I would not expect that kind of pricing to continue indefinitely, unless the publishers join in the fun and reduce prices as well.
On selection, it's interesting to look not only at the 88,000 number, but also what that includes. About 2/3 of it is nonfiction, the biggest single category that I found was "Science" with over 16,000 titles, of which 7,000 titles are books on sociology.
From what I know of ebook buyer patterns, Sociology ebooks are not exactly flying off the hard drives. About 50% of all ebook sales are romance, fiction. A quick check of the kindle store romance selections proves that it has about the same number of titles as other established ebook stores like ereader and fictionwise.
It appears that Amazon took every title they could get their hands on just to pump up the raw numbers.