Have I Become Parsimonious Since Buying an Ereader?

[Apache]

I used to think nothing of walking into a book store and paying full price for a hard back novel. That was $25.00 and up. Mostly up. Now I find my self hesitating to pay $12.99 for an ebook. Maybe it is the amount of books available instantaneously for a lot less, including free.
Apache

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Apache

I used to think nothing of walking into a book store and paying full price for a hard back novel. That was $25.00 and up. Mostly up. Now I find my self hesitating to pay $12.99 for an ebook. Maybe it is the amount of books available instantaneously for a lot less, including free.
Apache

I'm certainly paying less for my books, but I'm buying a heck of a lot more of them, so overall my book expenditure has significantly increased.

[patrickt]

Hell, no. Not parsimonious. The word you're looking for is cheap. When I bought paper books, I can't say I bought hardback without a second-thought. I thought long and hard before paying out $30 for a book. Back then, the books were almost always related to my work and as such could be considered as an investment. Now, books are purely for pleasure. Books I bought strictly for pleasure back then were found on the remianered shelves. For the youngsters here, those were hardback books that weren't selling and were being dumped for $2 or so. I remember buying a $6 paperback and then as I browsed the remaindered books on my way out I found the hardback edition of the same book for $2. Back then we didn't forums so I couldn't whine, "Why are hardbacks cheaper than paperbacks?" Ah, the good ole days.

Me, I'm cheap.

[xg4bx]

i hesitate paying for any books lately especially considering the publishers "need" to reissue everything in trade format. i used to buy a lot of trades, i just can't justify them anymore, nor can i justify the cost of the ebook version. i'm simply going without more and more often. $8 is my cutoff for both hard copy and ebook (i never liked hardcovers). too much far cheaper stuff out there.

[HoopyFrood]

I believe the word you're looking for is "frugal". I think I can count on one hand the number of hard cover books I've purchased. Why buy it for over $20 dollars when you can wait and get it for half that, or less, when it comes out in paperback? Although paperbacks are not the great deal they used to be.

IMO it's like buying a DVD when it's first released because you can't wait for it to come out as a rental. "Patience is a virtue".

And no way in heck would I pay over $5-7 for an e-book. That's why they created libraries.

[DiapDealer]

The price I'm willing to pay (in any format) is directly proportional to my overall yearning to read the book. Which in turn is usually dependent on the level of enjoyment I've experienced reading previous works by the same author.

In other words; if I really, really want to read a new release by one of my favorite authors... I'm not waiting. Period. And I'm barely going to glance at the price.

Ebooks haven't changed my overall valuation of the words I choose to feed my brain.

[ucfgrad93]

Originally Posted by HoopyFrood

I believe the word you're looking for is "frugal".

Agreed. With ebooks, Lately I've found that I'm spending less because I'm able to get so many books at great deals. Many of my purchases lately have been form the Amazon sales. The book I'm reading now The Fall of the Roman Empire by Peter Heather, I got for $1.99 and I just got another one yesterday for free. I still buy full price books, but not as often. And when I do it doesn't hurt as much knowing I have purchased some other books at really low prices.

[DrNefario]

I was already looking for bargains and special offers on paper books before I got my ereader.

I'm not sure I have ever paid full price for a hardback book. I always thought they were a dumb idea, given how much extra space they took up and extra money they cost for the same words. I still ended up with quite a few from promotional offers and remainders.

I'm no different with ebooks. I don't know if I spend any less, but I now have more unread books than I've ever had.

[Synamon]

Originally Posted by Apache

I used to think nothing of walking into a book store and paying full price for a hard back novel. That was $25.00 and up. Mostly up. Now I find my self hesitating to pay $12.99 for an ebook. Maybe it is the amount of books available instantaneously for a lot less, including free.
Apache

Availability is playing a role. Back when you were buying hardcovers you didn't have thousands of public domain books available free. You didn't have authors or publishers offering you free samples of books, or offering you the first book in a series for a huge discount or free. That bookstore wasn't offering you a daily deal for $1.99.

[Aladyleyna]

As a rule, I never buy hardcovers. They're bulky and heavy and extremely difficult to carry around, because I always have to bring at least two books everywhere I go, hardcovers are just not practical enough for me to justify buying them. Paperbacks are much better for mobility, and ebooks are much better than paperbacks in regards to mobility as well.

I do buy fully priced ebooks though; I just buy less books. And because of libraries and unread collection and my slowness in reading due to my workload, I find that I don't feel the effects so much. And since ebooks tend to cost less than paperbacks, now that my book buying has increased, I can't tell whether my expenditure has increased.

[RDaneel54]

I know that library availibility for Kindle e-books has really affected how much I am willing to spend on e-books. I am really having a hard time pushing the purchase button for Stephen King's 11/22/63 at $14.99. But then, I wouldn't have paid full price for a hardcover version either.

But, like DiapDealer, if it's a "must have, must read now" then it is easier.

My basic frugal, parsimonious, stingy side often says, "Don't buy!"

Multiple personalities, who needs 'em? No, really, anybody want a few?

Dean

[ucfgrad93]

I just found another free one here today. So for my last 3 ebooks I have paid a total of $1.99. Not to bad.

[ATDrake]

I'm really cheap when it comes to e-books (mainly because I view them as being essentially disposable and often with embarrassingly shoddy quality control for the prices regularly asked), but splurge quite a bit on paper books (mind you, I buy artbooks, specialty non-fiction/reference, deluxe edition-with-extras graphic novels and such).

So it balances out.

But I think part of the resistance to paying very much for e-books vs. paper is due to the uncertainty and fluctuations surrounding file format availability ascendancy/decline and DRM-lock-in and other things which anyone who's been e-reading for more than a couple of years has already seen fairly major changes in.

So e-books just tend to give off this feeling of "will I still be able to easily access/read this in 20 years?" impermanence that paper books don't have.

[Synamon]

For every hardcover purchaser who buys cheap ebooks once they get an eReader, there will be others like myself who only bought secondhand books for a quarter or got books out of the library or had books passed on to me by friends and family and never bought any new books before getting an eReader. Now the convenience of purchasing ebooks means I've bought more than 50 ebooks in the past year. Sure many of them were $0.99 (I snagged 30 Ed McBain books a couple of weeks ago at that price), but others were as much as $13.

[RainingLemur]

Frugal. That's the same boat I've fallen into.