When Ebooks Are More (and Less) Cost Effective Than Physical Books

While many may prefer eBooks for the convenience they offer (or prefer paper books for the sentimentality), finding out which is cheaper isn't so black-and-white. Personal finance blog Get Rich Slowly shows us how to save the most money when buying books.

Photo by Pen Waggener.

All other preferences aside, it looks like eBooks are cheapest then the books are extremely new or extremely old:

E-books are great for new releases. For new books, the electronic version is almost always the cheapest way to go. At a friend's house the other day, I noticed he'd paid $29 for the latest John Grisham book. $29!!! That's insane. That John Grisham book costs $16 at Amazon, and the Kindle version costs $10. In fact, most e-books cost between $10 and $12. When the cost savings is combined with the space savings, e-books are the clear winner for new releases.

E-books are okay for classics. Anything that's in the Public Domain (published before 1923) can generally be downloaded to your e-book reader for free. Sometimes the formatting is goofy, and there usually isn't any supplemental material (like essays and notes), but you do get the books at no cost. (Searching for free Kindle books? Here's Amazon's list of free eBook collections, and here's their best-sellers in the Kindle store, including free books on the right.) Of course, these books can usually be had for cheap (or free) in their dead tree versions, so there's not a huge savings here.

E-books suck for most titles published between 1923 and, say, 2008. Books from the past century are still priced between $5 and $10 in electronic editions. This is ridiculous. You can borrow these for free from your public library. Or you can go to a used bookstore, a garage sale, or a thrift store to pick them up for less than they cost in digital format. Plus, tons of popular books aren't evenvailable electronically. (A real-life, typical example: Cry, the Beloved Country costs $12 on the Kindle. A brand-new paperback copy from Amazon? $9. The mind boggles.)

It's a rather interesting pattern, though good to know if you don't particularly have a preference for one over the other. Of course, if you find eBooks are just too darn convenient and instantaneous (or you prefer to have the physical copy for sentimental, ease of lending, or other reasons), you can always stick to your preferred media and we won't yell at you.

Note that the above also doesn't take into account the cost of buying an e-reader, which only pays for itself if you read a lot of books, so unless you use it for other things anyway, you'll want to keep that in mind as well. Hit the link to read more, and if you've noticed a similar patter, share how you manage your book buying in the comments below.

Benjamin Weaver is an outsider in eighteenth-century London: A Jew among Christians; a ruffian among aristocrats; a retired pugilist who, hired by London's gentry, travels through the criminal underworld in pursuit of debtors and thieves.

In A Conspiracy of Paper, Weaver becomes entangled with a crime of the most personal sort, involving the mysterious death of his estranged father, a notorious stock-jobber. To find the answers he seeks, Weaver must contend with a garrulous prostitute who knows too much about his past, estranged relatives who remind him of his alienation from the Jewish faith, and a cabal of powerful men in the world of British finance who have disguised their business dealings with an intricate web of deception and violence.

The more Weaver discovers, the darker the truth becomes, until he realizes that he is following too closely in his father's footsteps-and they just might lead to his own grave. Relying on brains and brawn, Weaver uncovers the beginnings of a strange new economic order based on stock speculation - a way of life that poses great risks for investors, but real dangers for Weaver and his family.

An enthralling historical thriller, A Conspiracy of Paper will leave readers wondering just how much has changed in the stock market in the last three hundred years..."
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Tuesday, December 28, 2010

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When Ebooks Are More (and Less) Cost Effective Than Physical Books

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