When the Kindle price is higher than the physical book
I was looking for some books about experimental particle physics because I wanted to buy a book or two to add to my library. I have most of the classics in the field either in a physical form or legally obtained digital copies. So I was looking for some newer titles to expand my collection. I usually resort to Amazon to find related books (Even though I rarely buy from there). But they have decent recommendation system in this genre. Fortunately no particle physics book publisher pushes their books with ads hard like your average Amazon seller.
I came across some good titles with good reviews. One of them in particular got my attention because I know the author, he is quite known ATLAS physicist and I knew one of his students. But to my surprise the price tag got my attention. The book is Experimental Particle Physics: Understanding the Measurements and searches at the Large Hadron Collider and is priced $30 for paperback and $120 for new hardcover. Well it is bizarre that the hard cover is worth 4x the price, but one can argue that it might some problems about availability or that hardcovers demand is high, and it is costly to do it for very niche books like that. But then we can see that the Kindle price is about $128 which is even higher than the hardcover price. Add to that the fact that Amazon finally admitted that you’re actually licensing the Kindle version, and you don’t buy it.
So what the hell is going on here, why is the Kindle version more expensive than the hardcover? Isn’t the original appeal of e-books their lower price point and convenience? You don’t spend too much on papers, printing and distribution. I understand that there are still costs associated with distributions, but it is much less than physical books. Also, the markup and author and editors cuts should be the same (at least percentage wise) so why is the Kindle version priced higher?
Is it only this book or are there other instances of Kindle books being priced higher than their physical counterparts? I asked myself this question and decided to investigate further. I will stay within the realm of physics books and see if this is a common trend. I don’t want to spend too much time or resort to any programmatic way to get the data (I don’t want to scrape Amazon). So I will keep it simple by looking into the first few results of the search term experimental particle physics on Amazon.
This is the list and prices for the first 10 books (prices are rounded to the nearest dollar)
| Title | Softcover price | Hardcover price | Kindle price |
|---|---|---|---|
| High-Energy-Density Physics: Foundation of Inertial Fusion and Experimental Astrophysics | $83.00 | $83.00 | $79.00 |
| High-Energy-Density Physics: Fundamentals, Inertial Fusion, and Experimental Astrophysics | $85.00 | $77.00 | $80.00 |
| Nuclear Physics: Principles and Applications | $64.00 | $323.00 | $59.00 |
| Experimental Particle Physics: Understanding the measurements and searches at the Large Hadron Collider | $30.00 | $120.00 | $128.00 |
| The Experimental Foundations of Particle Physics | $46.00 | $133.00 | $122.00 |
| Nuclear and Particle Physics: An Introduction | $50.00 | NA.00 | $71.00 |
| Elementary Particle Physics: An Intuitive Introduction | NA | $55.00 | $52.00 |
| The Standard Model: From Fundamental Symmetries to Experimental Tests | $44.00 | $47.00 | NA |
| Physics at the Terascale | NA | $167.00 | $200.00 |
| Particle Accelerator Physics II: Nonlinear and Higher-Order Beam Dynamics | $92.00 | $52.00 | $79.00 |
Looking at these numbers, I’m genuinely puzzled by the pricing strategy at play here. Even with my quick and admittedly unscientific survey, finding that half of these physics textbooks have Kindle editions priced higher than their hardcover counterparts is a word against everything we were promised about the affordability and accessibility of digital books. The most egregious example, that Experimental Particle Physics book that started this whole investigation has its Kindle edition at $128, a whopping $98 more than the paperback edition. That’s probably not a pricing error but instead, a pricing philosophy that seems to actively punish digital readers. When you factor in that we’re merely licensing these books rather than owning them, the value proposition becomes even more absurd. Amazon probably is losing money on all the sales of their Kindle hardware with all these sales and is trying to recoup those losses through inflated e-book prices. But even so, it raises the question: what is the true cost of digital convenience? We’re currently paying premium prices for restricted access to content that costs less to produce and distribute than its physical counterpart.
While I acknowledge this isn’t a comprehensive study, it is just a frustrated physicist’s afternoon investigation into the first page of Amazon results, the pattern is clear enough to be concerning. Academic publishers seem to have turned the e-book promise on its head, at least in our field. Perhaps they’re banking on institutional purchases where price sensitivity is lower, or maybe they’re trying to protect their physical book sales. Whatever the reason, it’s a disappointing state of affairs for those of us who embraced digital reading expecting both convenience and cost savings. Until this pricing insanity gets sorted out, I’ll be sticking to used physical copies. At least with a physical book, I know it’ll still be on my shelf in ten years, regardless of what happens to Amazon’s licensing agreements. And a plus is that on average I will be saving money too!
I also admit that things might be quite different for other genres or outside the textbooks’ realm it might be different. But one thing that we should keep in mind is that Kindle is very bad as a platform for academic texts. The lack of features like easy annotation, and bad color support (even with the latest Kindle models) makes it a subpar choice for anyone serious about using them for academic texts. The best thing that I find is to use my old normal iPad for reading PDFs and taking notes. It even has decent Kindle app for reading that makes it easier to see colors. The advantage of e-ink seems to be its battery life and readability in bright light, but for academic purposes, the trade-offs are becoming harder to justify and sometimes not even possible.
Maybe things are different on other e-readers, but I went with an android based e-reader because I don’t want to be locked into Amazon’s ecosystem or anyone else’s. And I can try to obtain PDF versions and read on it and enjoy e-ink. Although I find myself always going back to my iPad for any serious reading.
So how this story ends? It started with me getting interested into reading one particular book. Well, I just ended up getting a physical copy loaned from the CERN library, and now I have what I want to read before going to bed for the next month.