[andrewla]

In my view the death of the eReader is just the price fixing on ebooks -- that ebooks are sold at par with at a premium to physical books still bothers me, and I think is responsible for the fact that the Kindle is dying -- Amazon can't move enough ebooks at these price levels to be worth investing anything in interested new hardware.

[delecti]

Is the Kindle dying? A cursory check suggests otherwise. Checking the sources on the "Sales" section of Wikipedia, they sold $5bn of devices in 2014 [0], and then hit a decade-long high in 2024 [1]. Now that's much to go on, and could easily have been worded carefully to imply things that aren't true. But at worst it seems like Kindle sales are doing fine. At a ballpark of $200/device, and assuming 2024 is as low as 2014, that means they sold a ballpark of 25 million devices in 2024. The percent of people reading ebooks annually is also increasing [2] (albeit slowly; arguably it's actually flat, but that's still not dying).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Kindle#Sales

[0] https://allthingsd.com/20130812/amazon-to-sell-4-5-billion-w...

[1] https://tech.yahoo.com/phones/articles/amazon-unveils-kindle...

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/01/06/three-in-...

Edit: also MSRP on ebooks is lower than for print versions (very roughly 50%, based on a couple randomly checked books)

[andrewla]

This is a mea culpa on my part -- looks like the situation here has improved*.

I pretty much only buy ebooks now and the prices have been stable, but apparently print prices have been shooting up so the situation has now been corrected.

* improved in the ratio of ebook price to physical book price; ebook prices are still too high but that's just me complaining about how a quarter used to buy a loaf of bread or whatever.

[lokar]

It's hard to evaluate the cost of a ebook vs physical book without knowing the cut that the author and publisher get of the sales price.

[jmyeet]

Sure you can.

An ebook has zero cost of distribution and no middlemen.

A physical book has to be typeset, printed, shipped to stores, shipped to customers, marketed in store, etc etc etc.

If a physical book is sold for $10 at least half that is printing, distribution and retail.

Like the GP, the price fixing of ebooks at the Dane price as physical books mothers me as well, particularly because physical books can be sold, lent or given away.

The exact same thing happened when CDs launched. They were cheaper to produce than vinyl or cassette very quickly but they sold at a premium for no reason at all.

[at-fates-hands]

>> An ebook has zero cost of distribution and no middlemen.

100% incorrect.

ebooks still:

- Have to be edited, proof read and formatted properly.

- Have to have a cover design.

- Unless you're distributing on your own website (which is uber rare), you still need to pay for platform fees and retailer costs for distribution.

- Marketing and tech support which is the same for any book, regardless of what platform its sold on.

[jmyeet]

These are all fixed costs not per-unit costs. If you sell 10,000 ebooks or 10 million ebooks, the costs are basically the same.

And book themselves are 500k-5MB in size typically, which is a single HTTP request, basically. Actual costs of storage and distribution are basically zero (per unit). And sure 10M books is more traffic than 10k books but we're talking $0.10/GB or less in baseline traffic. This is like Cloudfare free tier levels of traffic. And while the traffic costs do scale, it's completely dwarfed by the amortization of fixed costs like editing, formatting and cover design.

As for tech support, it's not the same. Publishers have to handle returns from retailers. Ebooks don't. It's no more complicated than revoking a key and the actual process of requesting a refund requires no human intervention either.

This really feels like I made some blanket statement than offended your sensibilities so you decided to argue without knowing why, if I'm being honest.

[at-fates-hands]

>> This really feels like I made some blanket statement than offended your sensibilities so you decided to argue without knowing why, if I'm being honest.

Because you said this:

"An ebook has zero cost of distribution and no middlemen."

and then said this:

"These are all fixed costs not per-unit costs."

Which are two different arguments.

This really feels like you made two different arguments, then I offended your sensibilities by pointing it out, so you decided to argue without knowing why, if I'm being honest.

[BeetleB]

I, too, was once naive and thought that the price of goods is largely determined by the cost of production.

But as anyone who has taken Econ 101 knows, the price is based on what people are willing to pay for it. The cost of production merely dictates whether it is viable to sell in the market.

If most people are willing to pay $10 for an ebook, when the hardcopy is also $10, then $10 is what they'll sell it for.

[lokar]

You might argue that the convenience of an ebook would make people willing to pay more

[BeetleB]

Whatever the rationale: People will pay what people are willing to pay. If the price is too high, competition should bring it down. The price clearly wasn't too high.

When I purchase a book, I decide how much I'll pay based on what the book will do for me. I'll get the same entertainment/info whether it is printed or electronic. For some types of books I prefer printed, so I won't pay much for the ebook. For fiction, I prefer electronic (already have too many physical books in the house), so I'll happily pay for it.

Of course, smart people just use libraries :-)

[LeCompteSftware]

Sure, it's easy to evaluate anything if you make up plausible-sounding numbers about it.

The costs of printing and retail are definitely less than half the sales price: https://www.davidderrico.com/cost-breakdowns-e-books-vs-prin... Publishers say it's 10%; Derrico thinks they are underestimating certain logistical costs but no way it's 50%.

[jmyeet]

Did you read that? You’re picking out one cost: printing.

Scroll down to where the cost breakdown of a paperback is. More than $5 once you include distribution and retailing.

Or, as some might say, more than 50% of $10.

[LeCompteSftware]

Ok, then the other thing you're missing is that distributors also get a chunk of the ebook. You said ebooks have "no middlemen" but that's blatantly false, Amazon is the emperor of ebook middlemen. I suppose publishers could try selling ebooks directly but then they lose the Kindle platform + Amazon's reach, so Amazon charges for that service. They are a middleman.

[lokar]

And in some sense the publisher is a middleman. While authors can sell directly, they rarely do. All of the books I have read had editors, publishers, etc. Not just the author writing and uploading.

[aidenn0]

The publishers conspired with Apple to force Amazon to increase its margins.

https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/e-book-conspiracy-apples...

[Insanity]

I might be misreading your message, but most ebooks I buy are in the $5-15 range, whilst physical books I buy are usually $20-30 range. I'm reading your message as in "they are equally expensive" which is not the case. But I'm having a bit of trouble parsing your second sentence lol.

[andrewla]

It looks like you're right -- what I've noticed is that ebook prices have remained steady (and too high) but what I failed to notice is that physical book prices have grown wildly since I was last looking at the situation.

So maybe the economics are shifting -- I certainly hope so. I don't know if there's a big market for a premium eReader (like the Oasis) or whether there's a push to improve the UX to the point where it's usable, but I would very much like both of those things to happen.

That said, Amazon is definitely making a streaming push and the UX for their "Fire Stick" is on par with the UX for an actual "Dumpster Fire" so maybe they're just really bad at it.

[BeetleB]

> that ebooks are sold at par with at a premium to physical books still bothers me, and I think is responsible for the fact that the Kindle is dying

Ebooks have always been priced this way. How can it contribute to its dying when it was this way during the "glory" days?

[aidenn0]

That pricing really only started in 2010. Prior to that, publishers would sell them to Amazon at (presumably) a similar cost to wholesale physical books, and Amazon would mark them up much less than the physical books.

[com2kid]

A number of authors have written about this and the tldr is that ebooks aren't really any cheaper to produce.

Paper is cheap. Shipping is cheap. The incremental cost of making a physical book is so small as to be noise in the overall book price.

[jgeada]

If that is true, of which I remain highly skeptical, then it implies that books are wildly inefficient to produce.

What on earth are all the middlemen between book being authored and it being sold to a customer that add so much overhead that the cost of printing and logistics disappears in the noise???

[com2kid]

> If that is true, of which I remain highly skeptical, then it implies that books are wildly inefficient to produce.

It just means that publishers are really good at manufacturing physical goods. They've been doing it for several hundred years so no big surprise there.

Books don't sell in large quantities. The economics of scale for the publishes for labor aren't there.

No one is getting rich off of fiction publishing except for the rare break out author. Publishers go out of business (or get acquired) all the time because they are constantly one step away from being insolvent.

This is also why the industry has massively consolidated.

I highly suggest reading breakdowns of the finances of publishing books, it is an interesting field that is incredibly different than how we are used to seeing numbers work in software.

[foldr]

The middlemen are giving your book some (still probably rather small) chance of being bought in significant numbers. If you just want a big stack of books and don't care if anyone buys them, they're not especially expensive to produce.

[maratc]

When you consider that different ebooks and different font selection can result in lines and pages breaking at any random place, ebooks may actually be more expensive to produce.

[jgeada]

Don't think I've ever read a properly produced ebook. Page breaks fall wherever and formatting is dictated more by my size/border/etc choices than by whomever "produced" then book.

Nevertheless automatic typesetting and formatting have existed for decades! TeX and LaTeX are ancient and produce better looking results than any book I've ever read on any of my ereaders, and those aren't the only tools in this space.

Whatever people are paying for such "production" seems wasted.

[maratc]

I converted ebooks into PDFs specifically formatted for my reader size and typeset in the fonts I like. It had proper kerning, hyphenation, widow/orphan control, drop capitals, etc.

However that PDF is not reflow-able (or changeable in any way) once it's on the device, and that's not what people are buying ebook readers for.