Don’t Let The Kindle’s Ticket Price Put You Off – You’ll Save In The Long Run
December 11, 2009 by Andrew King
Filed under eBooks
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past ten months or so, you’ll be aware of the huge buzz surrounding the Amazon Kindle ebook reader. Amazon’s Kindle 2 was launched in February of this year and they then followed up just a few short months later with the large screen Kindle DX.
The Kindle is now Amazon’s top selling product – something it achieved in an very short time indeed. Currently it accounts for 60% of all e-book reader sales in the U.S. market. Amazon recently launched the Kindle 2 onto the worldwide stage, selling to over 100 countries around the globe. It seems highly likely that its domestic success will be repeated internationally.
Amazon’s Kindle is now virtually synonymous with e-book readers – but it is far from the only show in town. Consumer electronics manufacturers such as Apple, Microsoft, Sony and Barnes and Noble – to cite just a few examples from a very long list – all have their own e-book readers due for release in the immediate future. There is going to be cut-throat competition in the e-book market. In a way, it’s a compliment to Amazon that virtually any e-book reader in development which shows the slightest promise is immediately named the “Kindle Killer”.
The current ticket price for the Kindle 2 is $ 259. That’s $ 100 less than the $ 359 February launch price – but it’s still a fairly hefty sum. A lot of industry watchers are suggesting that a sales price around about the $ 150 mark is what’s needed to move e-book readers out of the high tech gadget market and into the mainstream retail arena. The enhanced levels of competition that seem likely for next year will certainly lead to reduced prices – which could mean that the $ 150 sales price will be achieved during 2010.
In the meantime, if you’ve been hankering after a Kindle of your own but feel a little put off by the high price, maybe you could justify your purchase by looking at the bigger picture in terms of cost. As a rule, e-books tend to be quite a bit cheaper than conventional paper volumes. It makes sense – they don’t use paper, ink or bindings and there are none of the transportation costs associated with shipping a physical product. If you read a book a week then you could pretty quickly offset the purchase price of the Kindle device.
Even better than cheap e-books, you can download a large selection of totally free e-books direct from Amazon’s Kindle store. Many of the free books are classics which are now out of copyright – Gulliver’s Travels, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Sherlock Holmes are just a few examples. You will also find more recent releases, possibly on special offer from publishers. In addition to completely free e-books, there are many books included among Amazon’s 360,000 Kindle titles which are available for a purely nominal fee – $ 0.01 is really quite common. You could very easily get the cost of your Kindle reader back just by using free, or low price, books for your Kindle.
Learn how you can easily and legally download free Kindle ebooks and make your Amazon Kindle reader pay for itself in no time.
