Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The surcharge is to permit you to download the book via 3G should you buy a "real" Kindle in the future. Look at it this way: suppose you bought 100 books and didn't get the $2 per book added on. You then buy a 3G Kindle; would you be happy for Amazon to charge you $200 at that point?
Really, applying the data roaming charge at the point of sale is the only sensible way to do it.
The surcharge is gradually being removed as Amazon do deals with local telecoms operators around the world. We lost it here in the UK earlier this year.
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The only sensible way? Why would it not be sensible for them to build the cost into the cost of the 3g kindle, and/or the sim card for those units?
Books should be able to be set up as low bandwidth , low priority traffic that cost the data carriers pretty much no marginal costs. Till then it would seem that not pricing in the unused cell data for people that never use it could increase sales of ebooks which seems a goal of Amazon overall.
While it is an easy way for them to make sure they get paid for the potential of the book being downloaded through a cell carrier, and does make sense on many levels, I do think good cases can be made for other sensible ways for them to handle it.