Two years ago we addressed eBooks and the Kindle, pointing out how the $360 device required about 150 book purchases just to break even compared to the cost of buying paper books. Convenience aside, eBooks were no cheaper than paper books short-term, which is ridiculous considering the savings a publisher has by not having to acquire resources, print the physical books, and distribute them to retailers.

Today, the ad-supported Kindle runs $114. With an average price savings of $2 per book,¹ a Kindle owner still needs to buy 57 books to break even on print sales. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal from last August, the average eBook reader goes through 2.6 books per month, which means their average savings are $5.20/month. We can say, then, that the break-even point for the $114 Kindle will be in about 22 months.

So just under two years for the average eBook reader to break even? That doesn’t seem like a great deal, even considering the nearly $250 price drop on the Kindle from two years ago. Rumours suggest that Amazon intends to release another e-ink version of the Kindle for even cheaper later this year, but even a $99 Kindle won’t rectify this rather major pricing issue. As we pointed out in the past, this pricing discrepancy isn’t as bad when we considering eBooks on a device that does substantially more than just present eBooks, like the iPad and similar devices. Here, the savings are considerable, because we don’t have to make up the cost of the hardware on eBook sales alone, since most people aren’t buying devices like the iPad for the primary purpose of reading books.

Yet, eBook sales appear to be eclipsing print sales despite the fact that the average reader isn’t saving money. Is it a matter of the up-front hardware costs not being considered by the consumer, or do most people simply value convenience this much? We imagine it’s a rather thin line, which is why so many people are still on-the-fence about switching over to eBooks. Presumably, by the time the Kindle reaches a price-point of $60, where a $2 price difference between book versions means that savings start after the first year of ownership, a lot more people will jump on the bandwagon.

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Despite the number of initial downloads, it appears that magazine “subscriptions” on the iPad aren’t drawing nearly the number of people that publishers thought they would. But a lot of this has to do with how magazines on the iPad are implemented, which only a handful of publishers are doing well.

First, a lot of people don’t want to download each new issue individually. And, when they buy a subscription in advance, they expect a discount, to the point where the digital magazine is cheaper than the print magazine. Two, they want to be notified when a new issue is available, instead of having to remember to check manually.

Second, several iPad-based magazines are little more than PDF versions of the print magazines. It’s fine that these magazines don’t have additional content, but manually zooming in on sections just to get readable text is a pain; minimal reformatting should be done on these magazines such that the smaller form factor of the iPad isn’t an obstacle.

Beyond the implementation, there are still many magazines (particularly those targeting niche audiences) that may do very well on the iPad but that simply aren’t available digitally yet. Larger publications also need to realize that they’re competing with free; the iPad is more than a magazine browser, so why load up a celebrity-gossip magazine when you can just load up Perez Hilton on the web instead? Look at where magazines are still typical fare: in waiting rooms, at the grocery store, and in bookstores. Usually, customers in these locations don’t have computers readily available; who brings their iPad to the grocery-store checkout line? Point is, the audience may be similar, but the setting for reading the magazine isn’t.

What it comes down to is doing more than just porting an analog publication to a digital format. The reality is that many magazines simply won’t survive the transition to the iPad, or any mobile electronics device, because the audience for that magazine is negligible in a world where the internet is becomes more ubiquitous. Other magazines will fare fine, even if it means tweaking how the magazine is formatted and priced, because the content of the magazine is more unique, and of a greater quality, than what you’d find on the web. In some ways, the future of digital magazines is much the same as the future of print magazines, only with the former, the web is an even larger competitor.

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As far as gaming rags go, the past several months have foretold doom for the magazine industry. It turns out that this mighty thing called “the internet” was finally realized by hordes of gamers who recognized that online publications are simply more timely than print publications. After all, with blogs reporting news in near real-time, who wants to wait for a corporate entity to report on the news when their take is neither timely, nor objective?

That’s not to say that blogs are inherently more objective, particularly as some well-read bloggers get similar rewards from companies whose products are pimped. That said, at least there are enough blogs out there to gather knowledge from, such that a more objective picture can be established. Even more importantly, most readers should be able to find bloggers whose opinions match the reader fairly well, whereas finding a gaming magazine with this type of similarity is more difficult. And that’s not even mentioning the cost of gaming magazines versus blogs.

That said, the one area that gaming rags have managed to excel at is the niche market, which the blogosphere may not adequately cover. To this end, we look at magazines like Scrye, which covered collectible card games at great length, arguably becoming the resource for the hobby. Unfortunately, it turns out that even Scrye can’t make it anymore, leading us to the conclusion that perhaps it wasn’t niche enough.

Overall, there are few magazines we can justify buying, and these even make us feel guilty since we’d be just as happy with digital versions such that we’re not taking up valuable shelf-space with treeware. Still, there’s a reason that a gaming rag like No Quarter can make it in today’s magazine marketplace: the material is often impossible to get from third-parties, as who better to write about a product than the company developing it?

We wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s sad to see legacy magazines go the way of the dodo, though arguably, the requirement that good blogs need to be sought out and found makes valuable information more difficult to reach by the masses, whereas print publications can be found in nearly any grocery store, book store, or applicable hobby store. Still, with less out-of-pocket cost, online publications will continue to become a mainstay for consumers while paper-based publications will continue to dwindle.

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Every month or two, there’s mention of the E-Book revolution, and the consensus usually tends to remain in the favor of traditional books. However, some people are taking the E-Book issue out of the casual reader’s hands, and putting it into the hands of college students.

Reading a novel on my computer remains something I dislike, though using learning material online is something I’m much more fond of. When I took my Intro. to Psychology class as an undergraduate, our text book was in HTML format, and this made searching for key words incredibly easy. When I took a couple Distance Learning classes later on, a good deal of my interaction with other students was via an online medium.

The problem remains in the level of interactivity. A message board is only so useful, since ideas need to be pushed back and forth before a complicated argument or discussion can have any true conclusion, while real-time interaction allows one to quickly skip tangental remarks.

The E-Book revolution (everything’s a revolution nowadays, isn’t it?) is one that may very well seep into other niche areas. For example, I was amazed to see roleplaying game publisher White Wolf sell their out-of-print sourcebooks in E-Book format. In my opinion, this is great for two reasons: one, collectors and game fanatics can obtain, in at least one form, texts no longer available, and two, players can have easily-accessible books in which to search for rules and other reference data without leafing through fifty books. The only thing that can make this better would be for publishers to release E-Book versions of their material before said material is out-of-print.

Of course, the bag of worms this opens could be rather unpleasant. Would people be more likely to pirate E-Books and not buy bound paper versions if these books were available in both formats? I’m guessing White Wolf thinks so.

Similar Posts:

• eBooks still aren’t “cheap”. – Two years ago we addressed eBooks and the Kindle, [pointing out](http://beastwith.in/2009/05/05/on-a…
• If eBooks are so successful, why the push-back? – Things have come a long way since we [voiced our concerns](http://beastwith.in/2009/05/05/on-amazons…
• More obstacles for eBook adoption. – By chance, shortly after writing our take on [the status of eBooks and the Kindle](http://beastwith….