Kindle Book Prices Creeping Up
There comes a time in a mans life when he has to put his foot down and stand up for a cause. For me this cause most recently has been the ever creeping increase in Kindle book prices. The main focus of the marketing barrage that accompanied the Amazon Kindle was that books would only cost $9.99. This sounded great as apposed to spending $30 for new releases. Now we are seeing an ever increasing creep of prices up. Many books available on the Kindle are selling for $14.99. For me this is just not acceptable.
I fully admit I am a gadget head, and I have the attention span of a 6 year old, even when it comes to books. I like to read many different things as my mood changes. So having hundreds of books at my disposal at all times is really great for me. At the same time I am a bit of a book romantic and love the idea of having full bookshelves in my office displaying my reading prowess. Nothing inherently sums up a person like taking a look at their bookshelf. Like I said if you looked at mine you would really get a sense of who I am and how I have a really eclectic taste and tend to be all over the map. I also tend to pick a subject and drill very deeply, consuming everything I can about a subject and then moving on. Case in point would be my approximately fifty books on poker. The Poker bug bit me, hard. I spent the better part of a year obsessively reading and experimenting. So now 2-3 shelves of my “library” illustrate this. Ok so you get my point. I love books, and by that I mean physical books. So the idea that I will pay $15 or more for a digital version doesn’t make much sense to me. Especially when you can often find a hard cover version via an Amazon used book seller in great condition for less then $10. I will pay for portability, absolutely, but there is definitely a line.
Besides the battle between digital and tangible there is just this feeling like I got duped. That in 2-3 years time I will be paying regular prices for my digital copy. This is of course assuming the Kindle isn’t obsolete in 3 years time. This brings up another worrisome idea, what if spending all this money on Kindle books is sort of like collecting that amazing VHS collection of every great movie put out in the 90’s. What did that get you? It’s basically why I stopped buying DVD’s a few years back, I knew that it was only a matter of time before I never touched them again and would have to buy all the exact same movies in another format. Now granted books are different and the formats they are available in I would imagine will be much easier to convert then in my VHS/DVD example, but I think you get the point.
For now I plan to stage a mini-protest by absolutely and steadfastly refusing to purchase any digital book that is charging more then $9.99 for the pleasure of reading it. This is no easy task. There are a lot of potentially great reads out there that are priced over that mark. Especially in the field of social media and marketing. It seems like all of these books are either freely-downloadable in PDF format or priced at around $15 for the Kindle. The ultimate irony I found was this book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price.” Now yes this book is priced at my acceptable $9.99 but come on! You write a book about how powerful the free price point can be, then you charge for it? Just strikes me as hilarious. In full disclosure I will probably end up buying the book and reading it and loving it, but it just goes to show some people don’t exactly walk the walk.