On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 7:25 PM, John Sundman <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> 2) In my inbox today a nice note from Amazon announcing a million or so
>  ebook titles in the Kindle Direct Publishing program (including my 3
> books, yay), are now available in India, through Amazon.com.  I wonder if
> this will change your buying habits? Or were those of you who purchase &
> read ebooks in India already able to find the books you wanted through
> other sources?
>

It is certainly a good start. Publisher pricing of ebooks needs significant
tweaking, because books in the subcontinent are heavily discounted wrt US
list prices. To take just one random example: "The Ruby Programming
Language" from O'Reilly, costs: Rs. 1,172 in the kindle store now, while
the paperback has an official list price of ~575, with up to 25% discounts
easy to come. There is absolutely no way I am going to change my purchasing
behavior with those sort of pricing discrepancies.

I have noticed that kindle editions of your own books are very attractively
priced. A great move, I think. But such deals are clearly hard to discover,
and consequently the whole platform suffers from an image problem.

All that said, I have purchased Kindles as gifts for family members and
loaded them up with free, out-of-copyright books. The availability of large
numbers of  "classics" makes it a great gift item for people who are into
reading. I gave one to my sister, for e.g., to encourage her to free up
some shelf space :) But I am still holding out on buy one for myself.

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