I remember when I was in college 15 years ago: Buying textbooks was always a wince-inducing experience.(To make matters worse, I was a serious heavy-loader: I always had to get special permission to take as many classes as I did... usually 19 to 22 credits per semester. The extra credits were language courses... one 3-credit French class, one 3-credit German class, and one 3-credit Portuguese class, plus a 1-credit piano independent study. I graduated with 200 credits in 5 years.)
Anyway, way back then I was easily spending $400 per semester on books. Here is (more or less) where my money went:
Amazon is coming out with a larger "Kindle" personal reader with a screen that is about the size of a proper sheet of paper. They are hoping to capture the $8 billion college textbook market.
Based on the chart above, using a new kindle to remove the costs of printing, storage, and retail, my $400 per semester would have actually been approximaly $135. (I took 10 cents out of the publisher's 15.4 cent marketing cost of free books.)
Sounds like a deal to me... although I think that the best part is not having to deal with 30 pounds of books every semester.
6 comments:
Your making the assumption that the cost of a textbook would go down due to the lack of the costs involved in printing/freight/store personnel and general operations and income. Just because the lack of those costs does not mean the costs will go down, new divvying will be applied, Amazon becomes the 'college store' and might actually take a larger chunk because its their device, then there might be concerns over piracy and so additional 'security' costs reflected with some sort of DRM scheme which doesn't really work and probably creates headaches for anyone who uses it (see Richard Stallman's famous parable 'The Right To Read') and the publisher/author will probably simply desire more of the pie.
Mainstream Ebooks have been around a while, and in some cases they have gone down in price to the consumer, but in a lot of cases they have been either equal to or even more expensive than buying the dead tree version.
However, the one thing you are correct about is that if people start carrying around their textbooks on Kindles and other such devices, the weight involved will very much decrease. Its why I love my Sony reader (we can't get Kindles here in Canada yet, and Sony can handle a great deal more formats) while I don't have it set up as of yet with my document/book archives, they would easily fit in the 12gig + 192mb (4 gig sd card 8 gig memory stick 192 internal memory) that is the limit of what the device can handle, which if I filled it, would have more stuff to read than I could ever possibly read in my lifetime.
Yes, I was aware of my assumption. I'm sure that the savings would not be as substantial as I calculated... That's Capitalism 101: Cut costs, increase sales, increase profits, all at the same time when possible.
I will make this assertion though over your point of order: When the final prices are settled upon, they will be at least marginally closer to "$135" than to "$400".
i have one of these. I use it to keep my brain from frying on airplains. I just bought the latest version. Good point is I can download books to it here in the philippines...better news is the sprint connection for downloads is included in the purchase price...bad news..connection doesnt work here in philippines.
Mike
It would be great if the student could 'highlight' text on the Kindle unit to aid in studying. Do you know if this is possible Jil?
No idea really. Adding notes and stuff too would be cool.
I believe there is a new version coming out that you can add notes to. And high light.
Has anyone else read about it?
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