Will the e-reader wars take prices even lower, and will it matter?

E-readers are becoming more and more popular and that’s sparked some price wars. Barnes and Noble dropped the price of their Nook to $149, and Amazon responding by promptly dropping the price of the red hot Kindle to $149 and introducing a sleeker, less expensive DX with a better screen. Borders got into the game too with its $150 Kobo and Sony has it’s own line of e-readers. Oh, and the iPad? Doesn’t count. Yes, you can read books on it but an e-reader it is not. Between it’s many distracting features (apps, videos, games, music, the internet), glossy screen that’s impossible to read in the sun, hefty weight and even heftier price tag, it does a great job as a portable internet tablet and a lousy job as an e-reader.

While the price wars have increased sales tremendously (I myself took advantage of Amazon’s price drop to upgrade from my trusty original Kindle to the Kindle 2), the other price war is annoying readers and has the potential to either revolutionize the industry or severely damage it. I’m talking of course about e-books. One of Amazon’s original selling points was that NYT Bestsellers and most other books would be $9.99 or less. Unfortunately the publishing industry, blinded by ignorance and stubbornly clinging to the notion that e-books are evil and HURT sales when statistics show the complete opposite is true, have been determined to force Amazon to break that promise. When the iPad was announced Steve Jobs fed the flames by offering an agency model for the iBooks Store that let the publishers set the price. This led to a fight with Amazon, books being yanked from the site, and then returning at price points of $12.99 and up for some publishers.

That leads me to wonder, what good are falling e-reader prices when the publishers are determined to jack up the price of ebooks? I will never understand why they hate ebooks so much. Everyone I know who has an e-reader says they actually read MORE books since getting it. Sales of Kindle books outdid sales of hardcovers on Amazon. Overall sales of ebooks have skyrocketed while sales of traditional books have shown much less growth. Yet publishers are still doing everything they can to crush e-books. It started with their war against the text to speech function on the Kindle. Outraged, they claimed it would hurt sales of audiobooks, conveniently ignoring the fact that the Kindle plays traditional audiobooks and that the text to speech feature, while convenient, is far from the audiobook experience. The voices are faintly robotic, devoid of emotion and tend to mispronounce things-for example “Dr. Watson” would be read as “Drive Watson.”

The greed and foolishness of the traditional publishing industry does seem to have one silver lining though. It’s resulted in a whole new kind of publishing as many authors turn their backs on the traditional publishing routes and instead publish their books themselves as Kindle e-books using sites like Lulu or Amazon’s own publishing platform. This allows them to get published fast and keep more of the profits for themselves. This has resulted in a lot of promising new authors being able to get their work in front of readers that otherwise may never have discovered them. Gives a whole new meaning to “By the people, for the people”.

Are you a fan of ebooks and independent authors? Why or why not?
Read [PCWorld]