Will Reading Costs Fall Thanks To The Amazon Kindle?

The latest Amazon Kindle e-book reader is, in my opinion at least, a dream come true. Of course, I can’t deny that, being someone who counts reading as one of my most enjoyable hobbies, I must be pretty much the Amazon marketing team’s ideal consumer. Typically, I would expect to read, as an absolute minimum, one book each week – and it’s not so very unusual for me to have one novel, one non-fiction and a fair number of reference books under consideration at any one time.

I don’t think that’s so really uncommon, otherwise traditional print books wouldn’t sell so well, but it does mean that I can spend quite a bit of money on books. Putting the costs of the books to one side, my mini library of books does tend towards untidy and soon eats up a fair bit of space at home. Every once in a while I rummage through the heap of books and, putting the reference books and my other favourites aside, have a tidy out. Normally the books find their way to friends, relatives or charity shops.

I recently got rid of over fifty volumes in advance of moving house. It wasn’t until I saw them collected, packed up and ready to go, that I realised I was looking at a spend of anything between $500 and $1000 which had accumulated in less than a year.

Now, whilst the Amazon Kindle is a fairly pricey item in itself, the downloadable e-books from the Kindle store are usually quite a bit cheaper than the printed equivalent. After all, the publisher will have no printing and distribution costs and there will be no postal charges for Amazon. Even with a saving of just a few dollars per book, quite achievable it seems, anyone who reads on a regular basis would pretty quickly recoup the cost of the device and then start saving money over time.

The potential benefits aren’t just financial. The Kindle 2 has enough memory for approximately 1500 e-books. The Kindle DX has enough room for 3500 books. That’s a fair amount of books – and it needs a lot of physical storage space that will no longer be taken up in your house or office.

Some users have suggested that the Kindle is a green, eco-friendly, device – based upon the fact that it will save on the usage of paper. The logic is easy to see, but obviously some thought should also be given to the materials used in production as well as the disposal of the device at the end of its useful life.

The actual benefits achieved will vary from user to user and will probably depend chiefly on how many books are bought per annum. However, for avid readers, it does appear that the Kindle offers a number of different advantages which should more than justify the relatively high initial cost.