$9.99 Top Price Users are Willing to Pay For Kindle Books

9th July 2008

$9.99 Top Price Users are Willing to Pay For Kindle Books

tags: Kindle news |

One of the wonderful things about the Kindle is that you can get new releases and best-sellers at $9.99, instead of the $24.99 you’d usually pay for them at the bookstore. It seems some publishers, however, aren’t getting the hint that the low price entices Kindle users to buy.

For example, the book Upgrade Your Life, edited by Lifehacker.com editor Gina Trapani, is listed at $17.95. For that price, I’d rather just order the printed book for $19.79 (Amazon’s price as of this writing). Better yet, maybe I just won’t order the book at all.

And I’m not the only one. The discussion in the comments on Lifehacker.com when they announced the Kindle release of the book were very clear that Kindle users refuse to pay more than $9.99 for a Kindle book. You can read all the comments here, but my favorite comment was from a user named Gideon who says,

I ran to buy it… but 18 bucks stopped me cold.

What about you? Would you pay more than $9.99 for a Kindle book?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 12:06 pm and is tagged as Kindle news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Other Posts of Interest:

1 On July 13th, 2008, Michael Lomker said:

I think that price is relative. The problem is that you cannot resell a Kindle book, you cannot give away a Kindle book to a friend, and the publisher has no physical infrastructure costs (printing, storage, shipping, etc). They need to compensate Kindle purchasers adequately for these limitations and the (perceived) cost savings.

I suspect that the average Kindle owner is also an Amazon Prime member (we don’t pay for shipping) so $2 is not going to cut it. How about 25% less than Amazon’s regular price? That would be attractive enough for me.

2 On July 14th, 2008, TSO said:

I won’t pay more than $9.99 but I think we’re going to see more and more Kindle books with prices > $9.99.

Reminds me of the early days on ‘the net, how you’d see on amazon.com’s website used books with really good prices. Now you typically see a used copy for only $4 less than the price of a new book. Which means if you’re an Amazon Prime member, there’s no reason to go for the used copy since they’re the same price.

Fortunately there’s always abebooks.com. The problem with Kindle is there’s not much of a competitor, at least for newly published books. Anytime anyone has a monopoly there’s a problem.

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