I am sorely tempted to get the new Kindle. I really liked all the features of the first version but, truth be told, it was just too damn fugly. Thankfully, Amazon not only gave the second iterationof its ground-breaking e-book a badly-need facelift, it seems they also fixed several shortcomings while improving the features that did work.
As part of my ongoing internal deliberations, I decided to run the math on my book purchases and see where the Kindle would net out.
James Martin at PC Worlddid this a couple days ago, but I have some issues with his calcuations. First, he says this:
For the sake of argument, let’s say I’m an avid reader who buys two paperbacks per month from Amazon. The average price of a book on Amazon’s top 10 nonfiction paperback bestseller list is $16.19 (based on my calculations). If I bought 24 paperbacks a year, that’s $32.38 per month or $388.56 a year.
I’m not sure where he’s getting those prices. I couldn’t find a “Amazon’s non-fiction paperback bestseller list”, though I did find a New York Times non-fiction paperback bestseller list. The prices on those books ranged from about $9 to $12, not the $16 Martin found.
Martin’s bottom line?
Still, my number crunching reveals that even a loyal reader of paperbacks would only have saved $58.82 by the end of the second year of Kindle 2 ownership.
My instincts told me that while the Kindle wouldn’t realize massive savings for typical readers, it would offer a bit more than $59 a year. So I looked at some real-world numbers, namely, my own actual purchasing history from the past year.
In the last 12 months, I bought 24 books from Amazon costing a total of $311.03 before tax. Sixteen of those are available in Kindle editions that would have cost a total of $150.61. Those 16 books cost $200.45, so switching to the Kindle would have saved $50. If all 24 of my purchases were available in Kindle editions, they would have cost $233, saving me about $78.
Yet there’s another wrinkle. I pay $70 a year for Amazon Prime, which gives me default 2-day shipping on all my stuff. Of course I ordered everything from CDs to a GPS device on Amazon last year, but books probably made up half of my orders. CDs probably made up another 1/4 to 1/3. But I’ve recently switched largely to ordering MP3s straight from Amazon’s digital store, obviating the need for CDs. If I bought a Kindle, I’d probably have justification to drop out of the Prime program. There would probably still be some things I’d have to pay shipping on, so let’s conservatively say I’d save half of the cost of Prime — $35.
That brings my annual savings up to $113. That’s about double Martin’s estimated savings. Of course, the Kindle costs close to $400 with tax, so it would still take nearly four years to recoup the cost.
The catch is that a device like the Kindle isn’t just about straight savings is it? It’s about . It’s about new functionality, like searching your library for that great quote or factoid. It’s about having an entire library at your fingertips. Financial savings is part of the equation, and helps justify the purchase, but it’s not necessarily the most important factor.
