Before you click the link to see the book take a guess at the cost. See how close you are.
Very expensive Kindle ebook title: Practical Variable Speed Drives and Power Electronics (Practical Professional Books)
The sales rank for the book is 32,000. I wonder if Amazon really sold a copy or if certain Amazon employees have free downloads and they got the book just to say they had a title this expensive or just to see what a book that cost this much looks like.
Wow, that makes The Effing
Wow, that makes The Effing Librarian’s book look cheap.
cheaper than
These days, it’s cheaper than a college education, so maybe it’s a deal.
just for that, I’m making my Kindle ed. $50,000
that’s my incentive to create an Amazon account and upload a Kindle version of my book… you know someone is going to download it by accident… not getting the money won’t matter, but some news show will want to interview the author who thinks his book is worth $50k… and then it’s on to my own reality TV show.. !!
At Barnes and Noble…
it is only $50 or so for a print edition
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?r=1&ean=0750658088
MUST be an error.
Does look like an error
Does look like the price is an error or it is the publishers way of saying, “We don’t want to sell this book in electronic format.”
There are books that are in the hundreds of dollars for Kindle that are the same price in print. One example: Molecular Mechanisms of Cardiac Hypertrophy and Failure
Almost certainly an error
The same author has another Kindle ebook for about $46, so this is almost certainly a misplaced decimal point. But it makes a great story…sell one copy and you’re pretty much set.
Yet still
It’s over $10,000 cheaper than the digital list price of $52,395!
I am waiting on buying a Kindle
I think it is simply too expensive for what it offers. Then again, so is the Sony E-Book.
Considering that it is a relatively simple device, and is really a means by which people can buy ebooks and e-subscriptions to magazines, that offers access to a number of free internet sources like wikipedia, blogs and some free books that are no longer under copyright, 350 dollars is just excessive. The electronics in the device are not really more complicated than the electronic in many other “Internet Devices” like MSNTV or the various Wifi Internet Radios on the market, which started out at about the same price as the Kindle, but came down to as low as 75 dollars within two years of coming on the market, by the time of their second generation.
My first wifi radio, purchased three years ago originally sold for 359 dollars in the U.S. It had already been available in Britain for a year. By the time this first model was imported into the United States and put on sale, it was still sold for 359 here, but at least a dozen competitor models were being sold, for as low as 100 dollars. Today, models are available for 75 dollars.
The first generation Kindle sold for about 350, was lowered to 299 and now the second generation is back up being sold at 359 again. Amazon also seems to really not have a very good supplier either, because while they were not able to predict initial sales, they should have a good idea now of the demand, and also the large demand and the larger scale of production should have brought prices down somewhat.
To put is simply, I probably will not purchase something like a Kindle until the prices come down to someplace between 125 and 150 dollars. The original e-book readers were relatively highly priced, but they also came down in price within two or three years. Amazon seems intent to keep this device as a higher end product, something that most people will not buy, or limited to either librarians, who are paid relatively low salaries, but have some sort of professional interest in it, and outside of librarians, purchases will be limited to an economic elite. Less expensive models of the Kindle could do wonders for children in economically deprived areas, areas where library services are scarce or distant.
The Kindle would also be a perfect device for libraries in relatively remote areas. My own public library offers all sorts of downloadable best sellers, music, movies, etc, that have time limits for use on a home computer. A less expensive model that would allow patrons to access such materials from home would do a great deal to boost library services.