

Ask HN:Kindle Popularity and the affect of physical books - pedalpete

Has anybody else noticed the cost difference between physical books and kindle books on Amazon seems to have shrunk significantly?<p>As an example, Guy Kawasaki's book
Enchangement is more expensive as an e-book than a physical book. 
http://www.amazon.com/Enchantment-Changing-Hearts-Minds-Actions/dp/1591843790/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&#38;s=books&#38;qid=1298425537&#38;sr=1-1<p>Was this inevitable?? 
Do you think we will likely continue to see an increase in the price of e-books?
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mechanical_fish
Ebooks and print books have different markets. Ergo, we should expect pricing
to be correlated, but different.

Consider: The economics of producing a hardcover book and a trade paperback
are not as different as their prices suggest. The hardcover costs a bit more
to print, but not significantly much more, because most of the cost of
producing a book is in the writing and editing and marketing. The difference
between hardcover and paperback is an artificial marketing distinction:
Hardcovers seem more substantial, and (more importantly) they come out
earlier, so they sell to the people with more money than patience and with a
taste in bookbinding. They are therefore priced higher to take advantage of
those folks' willingness to pay.

I suspect that so long as e-readers cost hundreds of dollars (and, more
importantly, e-books have DRM and can't be borrowed or resold) they will
naturally tend to be priced like hardcovers, or worse.

