"Hylozoic," the physical book: saying good-bye.
(Credit: Scott Stein/CNET)It's been widely debated since Amazon's Kindle began redefining the e-book space: when will e-books become more compelling than the physical books they were meant to replace?
For me, it happened. Today, at 2 p.m. Eastern, I went to Borders and returned a book I bought just a week ago. The reason was this: I found the book had popped up on the Amazon Kindle store for less. So I pulled the trigger.
The funny thing is I don't even have a Kindle. I have an iPhone 3G running the Kindle app. Yet, for me, in a crowded New York ecosystem where I barely have time or room to pull a book out of my backpack while crammed onto a subway, quick-fix iPhone reading does the trick better than anything else.
The book in question was "Hylozoic" by Rudy Rucker, an excellent and weird science fiction writer whose works I've become addicted to. I had tracked the release of his latest, a sequel to his equally odd "Postsingular," for months. I should have ordered on Amazon in the first place, where it was far cheaper than Borders' full retail, but I wanted instant satisfaction and got trigger-happy. Hylozoic wasn't available on the Kindle store when the book first hit the streets.
I submitted a "this should be a Kindle book" request to Amazon and went back to my life, when yesterday I discovered that "Hylozoic" had in fact been added...for $14.95.
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For what Houghton Mifflin is charging for the iPhone version of Philip Roth's latest book it should be called Chutzpah.
(Credit: ScrollMotion)I'm not sure why, but some analysts seemed a little surprised about Amazon's Wednesday announcement that it would begin offering Amazon e-books on the iPhone and iPod Touch and move beyond the confines of the Kindle.
First off, the company had effectively confirmed off-Kindle reading access in February, so it shouldn't have surprised anyone. Second, anybody who knows anything knows it's all about the razor blades (the e-books) and not the razor (the Kindle).
Like the game console world, the real profits aren't in the hardware but the software. Yes, the Kindle 2's hot now, but to reach a larger audience Amazon will eventually have to lower the price for the reader and shrink its margins. By contrast, the margins on e-books should remain pretty beefy and you can imagine all the cost savings involved when you don't have to deal with warehousing and shipping physical books. It's a great business model.
But there's just one problem. While Amazon might be able to find a market for $9.99 books on the Kindle, the iPhone/iPod Touch world is a very different place. Very few people are willing to pay that kind of money for any sort of application, let alone an e-book.
In the Apple app world, the sweet spot for selling anything seems to be less than $4.99--and more like $.99 or $1.99. Sure, you're going to get some best-selling series with almost cult-like followings (read: "Harry Potter" and "Twilight"), but the vast majority of books being "sold" on the iPhone are very cheap--and rightly so because the overall iPhone reading experience doesn't justify spending $10 (or even $5) on an e-book. (See Nicole Lee's in-depth piece on comparing the Kindle 2 reading experience with that of the iPhone's.)
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