The Wall Street Journal on the Kindle costs $10 per month.
So there is pretty much no resell value in a newspaper and it is unlikely that you will loan the paper to someone else. A newspaper typically has very little value a few days after it is published (unless you keep birds and need something to line the cage). When it comes to magazines and newspapers the economics are a bit different. You can share your ebook with other people who you trust to use your $300 digital reading device, but that is about it–oh and you can’t read something else while they read it. With the physical book, you can resell it, if you purchased it used, you’ll probably only be out the shipping costs to purchase it–maybe a bit more. You read the book and then eventually delete them if you run out of space on the Kindle–or you keep it around indefinitely. Paperbacks will usually run a bit less and if you buy the book used it can be substantially less. However, to buy a book for the Kindle, you’ll pay $10 while a hardback will typically cost $15 to $17. (I know that technically you can read your electronic book again, but in actual use you probably won’t read an electronic book over and over again.) The use of an electronic book is more in line with renting a DVD. Publishers are trying to keep the prices only slightly lower than the print editions even though they are basically one-time-use.Ĭonsider a DVD, you can buy it for $15 or rent it for $2.50. I think electronic readers would start making sense if a $15 book was now $3 or $4, but they aren’t. I can give them away, sell them, or trade them in for other reading material. Even more important, the books still retain some value after I read them.
The used paperback I bought for $1.00 is very durable and I could go through 300 of them before approaching the cost of an electronic reader. I agree that all the technology is there, but things have to hit a critical mass before they really become useful and I don’t see that happening anytime soon. I think we have a long ways to go before the infrastructure for really being paperless is in place. Now the Kindle offers a better way to read, even better than paper, and that starts to suggest going paperless is possible. People always exclaim they hate reading off the computer screen even though they spend hours a day doing so. We are really very close to having a paperless society that pundits have talked about every since I can remember. I have a Sony Reader which uses a similar screen and I agree with him that it is a very pleasurable way to read. In particular he looks at how his Kindle has changed the way he reads. James Harris has some interesting thoughts on going paperless when it comes to magazines.
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