Open Letter to Flipkart - Doing eBooks Better Than Amazon

http://www.paramaggarwal.com/post/30580914562/open-letter-to-flipkart-doing-ebooks-better-than

by paramaggarwal • 14 years ago

13 7 14 years ago

I would love to get the opinion of the HN community on this. Can Flipkart beat Amazon?

I don't they will even go for launching ebooks anytime soon. Amazon has an advantage in that they also sell kindle devices. This means not only do they provide a well rounded package, they also can balance the margins between hardware and ebooks.

paramaggarwal3• 14 years ago

Yes, I am also unsure, hence the whole article is based on the premise of 'if and ever' they do so.

statictype• 14 years ago

I have been inclined towards the paperback as it offers me far more value. There is no improvement to my experience that might make me switch my method of reading.

I disagree with this. e-Books offer a superior reading experience in almost every way except "if you fall asleep while reading and the book falls, you don't break your nose or damage your book" (which regrettably has almost happened to me on several occasions).

There have been several books that I willingly paid a higher price for on the Kindle as opposed to getting the paperback at a book store.

The convenience of having all your books on a single slim device (or synced between two) and not taking up physical space in your house is great enough for me to pay an extra Rs100 or so.

That said, I agree with the point on the whole - most people don't think like I do and will expect the ebook to be cheaper and will feel completely ripped off if it's not.

paramaggarwal3• 14 years ago

Yup, you are right! I would also be ready to pay a premium to not have the books take up space on the shelf.

But for a truly ground-breaking product (read: to beat Amazon) Flipkart needs to either 1. make it cheaper or 2. make it better.

JonLim• 14 years ago

I comment on this as someone who believes all your points, but also believes the price of ebooks should come down.

Yes, tons of value in ebooks, I love them to death and my wrists praise them for the slim profile of my Kindle, especially when reading my 900-1200 page books. They're amazing, you can change the font size on a whim, and the battery life on the Kindle lasts longer than anything I have ever owned.

That said, I don't believe the prices of ebooks should be "dirt cheap," rather marginally less than paper books. My logic is that there are less physical costs of an ebook, so the costs of an electronic version should be cheaper. However, it's still a young industry, publishers probably have not figured out a really efficient system for getting them into Kindles and Nooks and what not.

That said, it will be quite a while for prices of ebooks to change, I am sure. It will at least need the scale of paper books to even think about getting there.

egypturnash• 14 years ago

There are reasons for everything you think Amazon is doing wrong. Mostly they boil down to "having to deal with entrenched old media companies who are married to the physical medium".

Amazon's terrible prices on ebooks is due to them not having crazy deals with the publishers like Apple negotiated ith music publishers when they set up iTunes. People selling their books directly, without the infrastructure and tradition of a publisher, can and do set their prices a lot lower: http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2011/03/amanda-hocking-and-9...

Same with the cut-n-paste. Publishers demanded the capability to limit that, and set how much you can do when they build the files.

(And as to gifting books? Well, if you're reading books on your iPad using a putative Flipkart reader, that may be out - the Kindle app on the iDevices has had its store functionality neutered because Apple doesn't want any in-app purchases they don't get a cut of.)

Flipkart, if they add books, will be bound by whatever deals it might make with publishers, the same as Amazon is. Maybe they'll do better when they negotiate with local India-only publishers. But I doubt they'll do better with the transnationals.

Also: > ebooks that sell well, can then be printed for guaranteed sales.

What? I know I sure don't want a physical copy of anything I bought as an ebook. I don't need more physical books in my life. Especially not copies of entertainment fiction.

Open Letter to Flipkart - Doing eBooks Better Than Amazon

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