Wired has an article on the boycott, by some energetic Amazon Kindle users, of Kindle e-books priced over $9.99; they're using Amazon's tagging system to identify books which go beyond their maximum acceptable pricing.
Included in this piece of news were a couple of interesting nuggets by Priya Ganapatti:
Last year, sales of e-books rose 68.4 percent from the year before to $113.2 million, even as overall book sales fell 2.8 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers. Much of that growth has been driven by the Kindle's popularity.' ...If that last sentence is true, there's scant hope for the online petition of those unhappy with the Kindle 2's lighter basic font and somewhat darker screen that many readers are reporting, except that the 250+ in the "screen contrast problems" group may represent many more customers - since the vast majority of customers don't post to online forums - whereas the boycott group involves organized processes by online customers.
The Kindle reader revolt is likely to be little more than a minor annoyance for the fledgling e-book reader ... analysts estimate that the company sold half a million Kindles in 2008. By comparison, 250 users is a tiny drop in the bucket.
Hard to know, though, how many other customers will look at prices higher at times than paperback editions and just decide that's more than they want to spend. The article puts the onus on the publishers and likens the dynamics to the battle between buyers and companies over restrictive copy-protective technologies.
Amazon had not responded to a request for comment as of Tuesday evening although the boycotters have used the boycott tag more than 7,200 times so far. Here's the massive forum thread
I know the feeling. I have a couple of books that I've tried to get a Kindle version for, as I am more apt to read them on the Kindle, which is always with me, very readable, and is very easy to make even more readable (with adjustments possible for font size and line spacing). But pricing above $10 has stopped me. The article cites the usual reasons that people feel the e-books should be priced lower.
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