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nekokami · 12-01-2006, 08:29 AM

Generally good points, but they don't take into account the overhead of handling paper books: storage, order assembly, shipping, etc. For a local bookseller, the savings would be good, but for Amazon the savings would be astronomical. The infrastructure to sell the eBooks is already in place, an investment since payed off by their pBooks business. Amazon stands to benefit hugely if they can get even a substantial fraction of their customer base onto eBooks.

I wouldn't expect Amazon to sell a reader for $50, but I could see them taking something of a loss per unit initially, or offering a substantial coupon in the at-cost price of the unit toward books/music, just to get the market primed. This would be a "limited time" kind of deal, like the free Amazon Prime trial they offered last year. But they've got to get the volume of ereader sales up to get the unit cost down and to realize those savings in book order fulfillment, and they need to build a critical mass of customers in the eBook arena if they want to be able to leverage publishers to put more of their inventory into digital format.

I don't think a reader will sell for anything close to cost unless it can accept non-DRM books/user content, but I would not be surprised if the only DRM supported on an Amazon reader is Mobi, and other formats may need to be converted to Mobi unsecured to work. (I personally would not buy it unless it can support PDF, even though I think PDF is far from ideal as an eBook format -- I have too many academic papers in PDF format that I'd want to be able to read. But not everyone is an academic.)

12-01-2006, 08:29 AM	#48
nekokami fruminous edugeek Posts: 6,745 Karma: 551260 Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Northeast US Device: iPad, eBw 1150	Generally good points, but they don't take into account the overhead of handling paper books: storage, order assembly, shipping, etc. For a local bookseller, the savings would be good, but for Amazon the savings would be astronomical. The infrastructure to sell the eBooks is already in place, an investment since payed off by their pBooks business. Amazon stands to benefit hugely if they can get even a substantial fraction of their customer base onto eBooks. I wouldn't expect Amazon to sell a reader for $50, but I could see them taking something of a loss per unit initially, or offering a substantial coupon in the at-cost price of the unit toward books/music, just to get the market primed. This would be a "limited time" kind of deal, like the free Amazon Prime trial they offered last year. But they've got to get the volume of ereader sales up to get the unit cost down and to realize those savings in book order fulfillment, and they need to build a critical mass of customers in the eBook arena if they want to be able to leverage publishers to put more of their inventory into digital format. I don't think a reader will sell for anything close to cost unless it can accept non-DRM books/user content, but I would not be surprised if the only DRM supported on an Amazon reader is Mobi, and other formats may need to be converted to Mobi unsecured to work. (I personally would not buy it unless it can support PDF, even though I think PDF is far from ideal as an eBook format -- I have too many academic papers in PDF format that I'd want to be able to read. But not everyone is an academic.)