World Book Alminac on MobiPocket

[bryus]

I got an email from MobiPocket today talking with The World Almanac® and Book of Facts 2004 avaiable for the MobiPocket reader.

Having just bought the book for my 7 year old for his birthday, I thought I might want to get it for my Palm also. However, their price for this 13815KB file is $39.95.

That's right!! $40 for an eBook with a cover price of $11.95. It can be purchased in paperback for close to $7 on discount or sale.

I am a big proponent of eBooks but I don't think I can justify spending 234% of the cover price to get it in eBook.

I will try out the 1MB demo and see.

What do you think?

[Omnitron]

Ebooks should be devoid of printing costs - once developed whether they are downloaded by 1 person or 1 million, the cost of preparing the inital file is static. As such ebooks should ALWAYS be cheaper than their hardcopy counterparts.

Which may be hard to do with some volumes going to the discount tables very quickly...

But I expect to see at least a 20% discount from a paper voulme. Sometimes more. NEVER an increase, let alone several hundred percent!

[PatrickS]

I'm not sure this is always a reasonable expectation. In particular, for reference material, I would expect just the opposite. No doubt you expect to be able to navigate around the electronic version using some sort of link technology. Well, that isn't likely part of the printed version (even in its soft copy format) so would have to be added -- a highly labour intensive task.

For regular paperbacks, though, I'd have to agree that the electronic format ought to be cheaper. I happen to think that the electronic versions will actually have a shorter lifespan than the paper versions due to the tyranny of operating system and media upgrades! How many people have very old Encyclopedia Brittanicas in their house? Do you think you'll be using this very same electronic almanac 30 years from now, having paid no additional fees to obtain it in a format compatible with the latest PDAs? That has to be taken into account when making a paper/electronic purchasing decision.