Laser Recession Buster Prices

Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader has proven to be an enormously successful product for them. It was originally launched in November of 2007 – but it was the release of the enhanced Kindle 2, in February 2009, which saw e-book readers really become established. Amazon followed up with the large format Kindle DX version in June of 2009 and the e-book reader market began to grow very rapidly indeed.

The Kindle rapidly became Amazon’s top selling item. Over the festive period of 2009 it became the most gifted Amazon product ever. Inevitably, many other manufacturers either debuted, or updated, e-book readers of their own. Increased competition levels led to reduced prices and gave end users additional options – both of these are desirable of course.

With significantly increased choices on offer, prospective e-book reader buyers need some method to compare the various options presented to them. It’s possible to find a lot of reviews on the web which compare the Kindle with Sony’s Daily Edition reader, the iPad with the Nook from Barnes and Noble etc. However, an e-book reader comparison focussed upon the hardware only is missing the point of the e-book reader experience. Typically, and as is frequently the case with modern electronic devices, the newer models will tend to include some features which are missing in the older models. However, considerations such as usability, readability of the display, how many books are available, the price of books, the ease of buying and downloading books etc. all need to be taken into consideration.

Some of these are subjective and a matter of personal preference, others are more objective and can be reviewed prior to making a final decision regarding which reader to opt for. The Amazon Kindle certainly has an advantage regarding the number of Kindle books available. There are more than 420,000 books available on Amazon’s website, and the number is getting bigger every day. As far as the cost of books is concerned, the Kindle also looks to have a clear advantage.

A recent study performed by the New York Times examined the cost of 10 books – chosen from the New York Times 10 Best books of 2009, comprising five non-fiction and five fiction titles – on the 3 best known e-book readers, the Kindle, the Nook from Barnes and Noble and Sony’s PRS reader. The total cost of 10 books for Amazon’s Kindle was $ 136.87 – an average of $ 13.69 per title. The same set of ten books bought from Sony’s store resulted in an average price of $ 15.26 and Barnes and Noble equated to a significantly higher price per title of $ 19.29.

Therefore, based on these numbers, anyone who averages a book a week would be almost $ 300 a year better off with the Amazon Kindle in preference to the Nook. In effect, the Kindle reader would pay for itself and there would still be a few dollars remaining to buy books, in under 12 months. There’s a lot of discussion underway between e-book retailers and the big publishing houses currently, so perhaps e-book prices could be subject to modification in the future. Even so, it seems self evident that anyone thinking about buying an e-book reader would do well to study both the availability of books and their pricing prior to making a decision on which reader to buy.