But I could buy the dead tree for that!

[lexin]

The price of ebooks. Yes.

I was looking today at Waterstones web site, hoping to find interesting and worthwhile ebooks for the beloved Sony reader which never leaves my side. Dear friends, Waterstones are crap. And people from outside the US/Canada can't buy from the Sony bookstore. I don't know why, you'd think our money would be as good as anybody's, but we can't.

Worse than their choice, for which no better word exists than 'abysmal', ebooks that I'd buy from them, just to have a copy by my side while I'm travelling, cost as much as, and sometimes more than, the dead tree version. Case in point, The Hobbit is £5.49 (a discount on the list price of £6.99), but the dead tree version is £4.19 – though its list price is also £6.99, the discount they offer is larger. Take also Lindsey Davis's newest book, Alexandria, £12.14 in the dead tree (hardback) version, but a whopping £17.47 in the ebook version. Even the list price of the ebook version is more over £21 as opposed to £18. Needless to say, I didn't buy it.

Thank goodness for Fictionwise and for smaller publishers. If I bought bestsellers I'd be even more seriously peeved than I already am.

Comments

[aliciajd]

I've had my Kindle for 4 months and am totally addicted. But the price of current ebooks is really criminal. At least the older books like the complete Sherlock Holmes are very cheap or even free. But I paid $9.99 last week for daVinci Code when the paper back would have only been $7.99. Of course by the time I paid postage on it, it would have been a wash. But still... This has got to get better soon. Because I can tell you, I'm through with collecting and moving rooms full of books.