eBook Store Comparisons – The Second Edition no comments
One of the biggest gripes about Barnes & Noble’s ebook store is their prices; which are higher than the competition, right? Well, hold on a minute there. Barnes & Noble has said that they are working on bringing down prices, and indeed there have been comments affirming this on their forums of late. Time to take a closer look.
Almost two months ago I made an ebook store price and availability comparison between Sony, Amazon’s Kindle Store and Barnes & Noble. In my comparison using just over a hundred books the Kindle Store came out ahead, both in terms of prices and in the number of books available as ebooks. Sony’s ebook store came in second and B&N came in third.
More recently Inkmesh made a much, much larger price survey using 11,604 ebooks. In their case they found that Amazon had the lowest price on 74% of titles. Barnes & Noble came in second and Sony had the highest prices of the three in Inkmesh’s test.
I just ran my test again, using the same books as before and came up with some surprising results.
First of all, what is Sony’s story? Mostly their ebook prices were unchanged from my last test: I found four books on my list with lower prices, but 5 went up in price. None of the paper books previously unavailable as ebooks from Sony have been made available as of yet. What was really strange though, was that I found nine ebook titles that were available before but are no longer showing up in Sony’s ebook store!
Sony just threw out their old proprietary BBeB ebook format and moved to EPUB, and it is possible that their are some search related glitches on their site. I did notice some strange behavior when I searched for ebooks by titles rather than author. So maybe the missing titles are still there, but I just couldn’t find them. At any rate Sony came in at a distant third place in my test. They are not only out of the race based on prices; they apparently also have an incredibly shrinking catalogue.
So how did Barnes Noble fare when compared with Amazon this time? Well, first of all, in terms of availability 80 of the paper books on my list were available as ebooks at the Kindle Store. This seems to actually be down by 1 title from the last time I ran my comparison. B&N had 71 of my titles available as ebooks, which is an increase of 6 titles. Furthermore, if you bought all of the ebooks on my list you would have saved only a little less than a dollar by purchasing them at Amazon. As reader Aoverstreet has pointed out, you would also pay sales tax at B&N but probably not at Amazon (not yet anyway), depending on where you live. It appears to be true that Barnes & Noble is aggressively lowering their ebook prices to match Amazon’s.
Based on the ebooks on my list it appears that the nook vs Kindle ereader competition has turned into a tighter race. This will be even more the case if Barnes and Noble can get the nook’s software issues fixed before Amazon releases Kindle 3. It is a virtual tie now when it comes to prices (again, based on my list of only 110 books). B&N still trails the Kindle Store in terms of content, but it appears that they are working on that as well. Definitely Barnes & Nobles deserves kudos for listening to the complaints of their customers and working to improve on weaknesses.
Matching Amazon’s ebook prices means B&N’s bottom line is going to take a big hit though, especially if ebook sales come to comprise 48% of all book sales as Jeff Bezos says they do at Amazon in cases where a Kindle version is available. On November 24 when B&N reported their financial results for the most recent quarter, they cut their earnings guidance for next year by a lot – almost by half if it comes in at the bottom of the range. This was blamed in part on increased production costs for the nook as the company ramped up its production schedule to meet the higher than expected demand, and “increasing future investments related to its (Barnes & Noble’s) digital strategy, including additional people, technology and in-store marketing support”.
I’m wondering if this “digital strategy” at the time also included planning for much lower prices from its ebooks? Of course, it may be possible for B&N to make up the revenue difference through sales volume, especially if the nook ereader brings in a lot of new customers rather than just converting the store’s present pbook customers to ebook buyers. My point is that I imagine it will be harder for Barnes & Noble to fight a sustained ebook price war than Amazon, which after all has many other streams of income than just book sales.
