Andrew Hyde lives in Boulder, Colorado and travels frequently.

Why Are Kindle Books So Expensive?

I read a lot of books and never got why books on Amazon’s Kindle were so expensive.  $9.99?  Greedy authors.  A lot of people agree, you can see by just browsing Kindle books:

Publisher Greed

The customers are firmly in the “The Author / Publisher is Greedy” camp. I never crunched the numbers until I released my own travel book, and I found out why kindle books are so expensive: it is about the % Amazon takes.

Why Are Kindle Books So Expensive?

So as an author I choose between Amazon taking 65% of my book sale price or the cost of delivery ($.01-$7.50) plus 30%.

So why are kindle books so expensive?  Look at Amazon, not the authors.

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Comments

2 responses to “Why Are Kindle Books So Expensive?”

  1. Ryan Wanger Avatar
    Ryan Wanger

    All the numbers you’ve provided lately do illuminate that Amazon is taking more than what most people believe, but we’d still be hearing the “Kindle books are too expensive” cries even if Amazon took no cut at all.

    Things like books and music suffer from this problem where a vast majority of the content creators never make much money, because they aren’t selling enough copies of their work to make a living on the $10 price. But most consumers only ever purchase the from the top 1% most successful creators – so all they see is millionaires.

    $10 is too much to pay for something that took months (or years) to create and provides (potentially dozens of) hours of entertainment?

  2. luis Avatar
    luis

    My grudge with the price is that the paper edition costs half.

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