[bustling-noose]

In India Amazon makes little sense. Neither does kindle nor does local book store.

The reason for this is that both paper and printing here is cheap along with labor. The original author also licenses for cheap. The publishing houses however take a large cut increasing the cost of the book.

People get a hold of the epub and print them and sell them for 1/4th of the price sometimes 1/10th for new and even less for used.

The only way I see around this is digital libraries. Let people rent unlimited books (but like Netflix limited at a time) and take a monthly cut.

[bubblethink]

Paper, printing, and labour have nothing to do with the price of the book. Like college textbooks and drugs, you can sell in India if you mark your prices in accordance with what the market can afford. Otherwise, people will pirate.

[AlotOfReading]

That's essentially Kindle Unlimited. It's one of the key pillars to Amazon's dominance of the publishing sector. As an author, you have to give them 3 months exclusive publication rights to use it. You get paid per pages read, divided among all the other pages a customer reads that period. And if you opt out, your book's distribution on Amazon is affected.

[zeroonetwothree]

Well yes, piracy is always going to be cheaper.

[cheeze]

Similar to how Prime Video doesn't work in many Latin American countries that have poor internet and sneakernet of hard drive swapping with piracy.

Of course piracy is cheaper lmao

[geodel]

> In India Amazon makes little sense. Neither does kindle nor does local book store.

Of course! The number of books outside educational material sold in this country with huge population is insignificant. And it is not much surprise since most people can't really afford much.

But at least mobile data is really cheap and Whatsapp is free, so people get all the information they care about just from this combo.