South Africa has finally gotten it’s first ebook store. It seems as if ebooks have finally reached the dark continent, at least to the extent that a retailer finally took enough notice to add an ebooks to their site.
Kalahari.net is one of South Africa’s leading online retailers offering books, electronics and Music and DVD sales – basically a much scaled down local version of Amazon. Today they added an
ebook section to their site hopefully ringing the dawn of better accessibility to ebooks to a market that has otherwise been largely ignored despite a seemingly large prevalence of reading devices.
The ebooks on offer are all either in ePub or PDF format. Pricing seems to be on par or slightly more expensive than other online stores, although the selection is still quite limited.
I did a price comparison using 6 randomly selected novels (exchange rate of R7.50/US$ used).
Pirate Latitudes
Kalahari.net - $24.53 (R183.95)
Fictionwise: $21.99
Kindle: $11.99
Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel:
Kalahari.net - $24.53 (R183.95)
Fictionwise: $27
Kindle: $11.99
Dragon Keeper - Robin Hobb:
Kalahari.net - $25.86 (R193.95)
Fictionwise: $9.99
Kindle: $16.41
Act of Treason - Vince Flynn:
Kalahari.net: $13.07 (R98.06)
Fictionwise: $9.99
Kindle: $11.59
Two Towers - JRR Tolkien:
Kalahari.net: $10.39 (R77.95)
Fictionwise: $11.99
Kindle: $9.99
Blindsighted - Karin Slaughter:
Kalahari.net: $14.63 (R109.76)
Fictionwise: $11.99
Kindle: $9.99
It’s sad to see that no local authors seem to have their work available in electronic format. Hopefully that will change once sales increase and publishers finally take notice.
At least this is a giant leap in the right direction!