If you live in the US you can buy Amazon’s eBook reader the Kindle for a ‘mere’ $359.
It’s selling, but not exactly rushing off the shelves. Over here, Borders will kindly take £399 (yes, around $800) off you for the Iliad reader which doesn’t even have Kindle’s neat download-via-mobile-phone-network technology.
That literary giant W. H. Smith has decided that eBook readers won’t sell unless the readers drop below £100 ‘or books become available on mobile phones.’ (See full story)
I think they’ve all got it wrong. First we can dismiss that ‘available on mobile phones’ rubbish. It’s fine for a quick snatch from a guidebook, but if we are talking reading, forget a phone’s screen.
I’d suggest the only way eBook readers are going to catch on is if they go the way Polaroid did with cameras – make the reader ridiculously cheap, and make your money on the books. By ridiculously cheap, I guess we’re talking order of £10 to £20 max.
Of course, there’s a catch with this business model – if someone buys the reader from you and the books elsewhere. Polaroid made it very difficult not to buy film from them. But it’s not impossible – in fact, the way the Kindle works, Amazon could easily get away with this approach.
Colour laser printers are often sold like this. A set of toner cartridges for my colour laser cost more than the printer, equipped with cartridges, did originally. They’re effectively paying you to buy the printer. Admittedly someone might decide to throw the printer away every time – but realistically, the differential isn’t great enough to waste the time doing it.
Even so, this demonstrates it’s feasible. Get your act together booksellers, if you want to sell eBooks. Give the readers away!
Another business model would be to give you the reader for nothing, but tie you into a contract (as they do with mobile phones), and then oblige you to buy eBooks from a ‘club’ on a book-of-the-month basis. Very attractive to begin with, and very hard to get out of. Actually, I’m amazed at my own brilliance. I could sell EcoMoi™ as a loss leader I guess…
Eco Moi ™ – is that where you sit in a cage and eat the lawn, Henry?
Yep – ideally they should do both. I think I would do it subtly differently like the audio books site does/used to – not have a book of the month, but you have to pay X a month to buy on books of your choice (so, in fact, more like the mobile phone approach). But my preference is the way they could do it with Kindle – give it away free, then make it so easy to buy books from them you can’t be bothered to buy them elsewhere.
EcoMoi™ is the plural of EcoMo™ as any fule knoi.
Some publishers, and I believe that Pan Macmillan is one of them if I have correctly understood their Digitalist blog, are producing their digital content in a format that is “reader independent”. (e-reader, that is!)
As most book publishers are curently beavering away digitizing all their back (out of print) catalogues, this question is quite a significant one.
Maxine – but that wouldn’t stop either my or Henry’s business model working.
Oh no, indeed. I meant significant for publishers.