@Sheamus

I don’t care if the Kindle has sold three million units.

Seth Godin’s latest book, Linchpin, is out now and available for $11.50 in hardback. The Kindle version, meanwhile, is priced at $14.09.

How on earth has Amazon managed to justify this, and, more importantly, why are Kindle owners accepting it? Here’s my theory: poor people don’t buy Kindles. Heck, average-earning folk don’t buy Kindles. It’s simply early adopters and others who have money to burn.

And if you don’t object to burning money, paying $14.09 for convenience for your fancy-new toy isn’t going to be that much of an issue. (After all – you’ve already spent $259 on it.) To you. Everybody else will rightly object.

Kindle owners might buy more books than the average person (if only to justify the initial expense), but the (incredibly) long tail is still in all those millions and millions of readers around the world who buy just one book a month, or only a few books each year.

The same reasoning behind MP3s applies to all electronic media. Once you’ve built one copy, you’ve essentially made a million. There is no warehouse holding thousands and thousands of unsold books. There is no risk. There’s just your one electronic version, which (bandwidth aside) takes up the same amount of space whether it’s downloaded once or a billion times, and is essentially all profit after the costs of making that download have been met. The author isn’t going to lose out, as the costs of making that book in that format are almost zero.

Godin’s book should be $2.99 on the Kindle. And until it is – and this goes for the iPad as well – they’re never going to tap into the broader (and hugely lucrative) real book-reader market.