Is the music industry over-charging us for digital music?

Posted at: Friday, February 27, 2009, 10:25 pm

Consider this from Walt Mossberg’s review of the Kindle 2:

The new model carries the same relatively high $359 price tag as its predecessor, but it offers faster page rendering and 25% better battery life. The catalog of books available on both Kindles has now swelled from about 90,000 in 2007 to over 230,000 today, and titles still typically cost around $10. You can still subscribe to periodicals and blogs, and there is still a crude Web browser built in—but this gadget is mainly for reading books.

Emphasis added. Question: Why does the book industry knock off almost two-thirds of the price of a book when it sells it digitally, but the record industry is effectively getting roughly 80 percent of the pre-iPod-era price of a CD?


2 Comments so far

  1. Dude 17 March 2nd, 2009 4:31 pm

    Well, what’s the cost structure of books vs. CDs - leave aside advances and royalties, how much does it cost to print, package, ship and store a product?

    $10 is two-thirds of the price of a hardcover book, and roughly equivalent to a paperback. My feeling is that we’re actually being overcharged for ebooks, since other than royalties, ebook sales involve basically no overhead.

  2. Dean March 6th, 2009 9:50 am

    My understanding is that Amazon is charging less for a book than they pay the publishers. They would like to make the Kindle their I-pod.

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