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Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

How long before eBook readers are entirely free, supported by subscriptions and/or sales of media? It seems like they are headed in the direction cell phones have already taken.

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The thing about mobile/cell phones is that they are subsidized only when there is a guaranteed subscription, namely the contract. If eBook readers can figure out a similar guarateed subscription, then yes. Otherwise, I don't see how they can be 100% subsidized.

Amazon may try to play a game of lifetime value of a Kindle owner and subsidize based on that. I'm hesitant to think that will work because if the price point drops to $0 to the consumer then Amazon will attract customers who will have lower lifetime value and thus end up costing Amazon the difference between their lifetime value and the cost of the Kindle.

Amazon could introduce a subscription service. You get the Kindle for free, have a monthly fee of $29 or $39, and you can download up to 10 titles per month. 1 year minimum contract.

A subscription plan with heavy discounts would go a long way to making me feel better about the DRM on books.

Most books are disposable to me: a tech book that is obsolete in a year, novels that are not worth rereading, a popular career or business book I read for context. $10/book is a little too much for something I'm only going to read once.

I disagree with your last point. Don't think of it as paying $10/book for "something I'm only going to read once", because its more than that. Essentially you're paying someone to work hard and labor on a topic you are interested in for years; and distill that years of research into a few hundred pages so that you don't have to do all the work.

Someone once told me that if you can get _1_ idea from a book that changes you're outlook on things; then it's worth it, and I agree. I don't understand how people can say $10 on a book is too much; you can friggin' spend more than that on one meal!

EDIT: And as eru said, if you still think its too much, join a library.

> Essentially you're paying someone to work hard and labor on a topic you are interested in for years; and distill that years of research into a few hundred pages so that you don't have to do all the work.

I am doing no such thing. Sure, some of my purchase price will go back to the author and in aggregate with other purchasers they may be fairly repaid for their labours. But the book is worth whatever I was prepared to pay for it.

What you proposed was the Labour Theory of Value; a thing is worth the effort and talent put into it. Intuitively attractive, but it breaks down in economic practice. If instead you accept that things are worth what people will give up for them -- the Subjective Theory of Value -- economic analysis requires fewer epicycles and illuminates more phenomena.

That said, I suspect I'd actually spend a crapload more money on eBooks if they typically cost $6. If something like an eBook costs $10, I'll figure out how to do without. Price it at $6 and it's just a little above the level of impulse buy -- a lot harder to resist.

From the sellers perspective, suppose they plan to make $6000. If they price it at $6 - they need to sell 1000 copies, if they price it at $60 - they need to sell 100 copies. Which ones easier?

I've spent > $100 on ebooks or courses, and they've been immensely helpful. I guess it depends on how much you're willing to pay for the value you get.

Have you considered joining a library?

To further this many libraries offer a very weird but usable ebook system which gives you the best of both worlds

What if you break it down into $\hour.

If you are reading for entertainment and a $10 book that 4 hours to read, that is only $2.50\hour. Seems like good value.

If it isn't for entertainment and you aren't deriving (syay) $10\hour of value out of it, then why are you doing it?

For comparison, MMO's are often below 50c an hour, and over the air wave TV run below 5c.

This sounds similar to Audible (which Amazon now own), or to one of the old postal book clubs. I can definitely see this appealing to people.

Video game consoles are generally subsidized, yet their customers have no guaranteed video game subscription.

But only a little bit - they are still sold for $200-$300 so you are selecting users who are likely to go out and buy games. If you gave away XBox/PS3 for free the vast majority of users would just use them fro playing dvd/blueray or browsing - not enough people would buy ninja-killer-car-stealer-gold edition for $60 to pay them back.

The most obvious difference is that most video game consoles can't play a huge corpus of out-of-copyright games that are generally of a higher quality than current titles.

Initially video game consoles are subsidized, over time amortization of development costs, decreasing wholesale prices, incremental redesigns to reduce costs, etc. bring the costs down to where they are not subsidized.

Nintendo has never subsidized hardware sales, they have always made a profit on their consoles and hand-helds. The XBox 360 console is now turning a slight profit on hardware alone due to cost reductions over time (though the Kinect is subsidized). I don't know about the costs of the PS3 but it's certainly far less subsidized than it was at launch.

Not in the sense that cell phones are. If you're MS or Sony, you sell your consoles at cost or for a slight loss, then recoup costs on software sales. By definition, the consoles are loss leaders.

Maybe they could have a package deal where for ~$100 you get ten ebooks and a "free" Kindle.

I absolutely love this idea, especially if those are otherwise-expensive books. For example, those 10 books for me would be Machine Learning-related, but I can imagine several popular packs : Harry Potter, Twilight, etc; would be a hit.

...and you commit to buying 12 more ebooks over the next year.

It's interesting that some products make the most sense to subsidize when they are very expensive, and other products make the most sense to subsidize when they are almost free. It's not really clear to me that subscriptions & eReaders interact in such a way that they fall neatly into either category. For example, as eReaders approach free are you really going to want a separate crappy eReader for each subscription your have, or would you rather have a really nice eReader for all your subscriptions? And if it's the latter, which I think it clearly is, then does it really make sense to tie one subscription into the initial purchase? The only way it makes sense is if you make something that's like the iPad of eReaders, so that it is the expensive option in a sea of other cheaper options. So even though eReaders will be almost free in three years, it seems like it could be another 6 years before we have the technology to make a luxury version of an eInk product. So in short I guess I would expect some sort of subsidized version in the three years, but I don't see it being done really well for another 6.

> which I think it clearly is, then does it really make sense to tie one subscription into the initial purchase?

Unless you're Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, etc. and want to be THE platform and have all subscriptions go through you and onto your awesome device. Apple's iOS AppStore is very successful example of this.

People still have to buy it though. Apple isn't going to make crappy eReader so I don't see them getting into the game more seriously until the technology is better, and I don't see everyone carrying around a Kindle either. The Kindle has done enormously well so far, but the fact is that the average American buys only 1 book a year and 70% of them don't even read it[1], so I don't really see how it's going to go from a few million sales to a few hundred million sales. Sure Amazon sells an enormous number of books, but that's because almost all books are read by the same 2% of people or whatever. So let's say Amazon does make some move to ensure that it continues to control eBook sales, what exactly would that look like? Almost everyone who reads daily newspapers already owns a kindle or is on track to within the next couple years, and I don't think people who read magazines would replace them with a kindle. And the student market is just an enormous mess that I don't think Amazon is currently prepared to deal with. So what other captive population would they really be able to capture via a subscription subsidy?

[1] Possibly apocryphal, but probably true enough: http://www.humorwriters.org/startlingstats.html

As long as there is no lock-in, I would support it.

If, however, we end up having a bunch of different readers each one locked into its own walled garden, I'm out.

We have Calibre, Calibre can convert all your ebooks for different e-readers.

Calibre can convert a Kindle DRM encumbered book to another format? News to me....and apparently the folks at Calebre since .azw isn't listed as one of the supported formats.

http://calibre-ebook.com/user_manual/faq.html#what-formats-d...

Calibre can't do the conversion, but AZW files are (most of the time) just MOBI files that have been DRM'd, so if you can break the DRM, you can easily convert it to something else (ePub, etc.) using Calibre. Fortunately, the Kindle DRM has been broken for quite some time, so there are plenty of ways to do this.

True, but if you're ideologically against DRM, it doesn't make sense to buy DRMed media even if you'll break it later. By giving them profit for DRMed media, you make it less likely that a non-DRM system will come about.

(At least, that's my reason for not getting a Kindle)

I'd rather prefer that we pay full price for the reader hardware, but be able to buy it anywhere in the world.

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