[LINK] 5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet

[Tom Worthington]

David Boxall wrote:
> ... Why do people _buy_ eBooks, when there's more in the public domain (or otherwise cost-free) 
> than anyone could read in a lifetime? ...

Not sure why people buy e-books, but they do. My Amazon Associates
sales from the beginning of the year to the end of May show:

Type	Number  Cost	     Average Price

Books	 21	$512.22		 $24.39
eBooks	 91	$590.89		  $6.49
Kindles	  2	$328.00		$164.00

The eBooks are, on average, one quarter the price of paper books, but
about five times as many eBooks were sold. The other interesting bit of
this is that only two Kindle eBook readers were sold. So either a few
people are buying lots of eBooks, they already have Kindles, or most
eBooks are being read on other devices.

Also the e-readers are expensive, compared to the price of the books.
You would need to buy 10 e-books and a reader, before this was cheaper
than paper books.

But then then readers of my Blog may not be typical of the general
public. They seem to buy books about shipping container architecture on
paper and then eBook Star Trek novels. ;-)

ps: As you can see, I am not really in the book selling business, I do
this just to get the attention of the students when teaching
e-publishing and e-commerce (if you talk about making money, then 
students listen).


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra