Book Prices

The default action for many is to think "I want to buy this book" and they automatically either buy a physical copy because they love physical books, or they buy an e-book. The default is almost always Kindle and Amazon because of its market dominance.

I was shopping for The Night Train to Lison and I found it for 6 CHF on the Google Play book store, around 8 CHF on the Apple Books store, 19 CHF with Payot, 20 with Buchhaus, or even more, and that’s when I find the book.

I toyed with the idea of reading it in the original German but to do this I would need to spend more than for the translation. I understand having a high price for physical book, because of the cost of printing, stocking, transport and more, but to pay the same for an e-book doesn’t make sense, especially since it is DRMed and blocked to a single device or reading platform.

The Kindle edition is just 4.66€ in English, and 15.99€ for the Kindle version in French, and 6.14€ for the Poche version. That’s just within Amazon.

There is an old view, and I think it holds to this day, e-books are cheap to produce and distribute so they should not cost as much as physical books. With DRM it becomes all the more absurd, because with DRM we’re paying for something that isn’t even ours.

Worth Shopping Around

In the end it’s easy to have the app for each ebook store, and to download those books and read them on your phone. If you’re ready to spend a little more you can get a library of e-book readers and have eink reading for each store. There is diversity in where we can buy e-books from, so don’t automatically go for the Kindle store. Check Payot, Google Play Books, MaisonDuLivre, Kobo, Storytel, Audible and many more and find the store with the cheapest copy of the book.

There is no monopoly on e-books, so it makes sense for us to shop around and find the most affordable copy of the books we want to read, whilst avoiding US based e-book stores if possible, for the next four years, at least.