How to Justify a Kindle 2 Purchase to Your Significant Other -- 5 Case Studies (Updated!)

Posted 02/19/2009 at 1:00pm | by Alex Castle

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Since Amazon’s announcement on Monday, we’ve had Kindle 2 on the brain. After all, the long-awaited sequel to Amazon’s ambitious eBook reader improves on the original in almost every way: it’s got a better screen, better battery life, more storage, better buttons, and it’s just a hell of a lot nicer looking, to boot. So what’s stopping us from jumping on the preorder list? The price.

Launching at just about 360 U.S. dollars, the Kindle 2 is a pretty hefty investment. But maybe we can justify buying the new Kindle anyway. We’ve heard people bandying about the notion that—based on the discount price for eBooks—the Kindle will actually pay for itself over time. Sounds good, but we wanted to find out just how long it would take to break even, so we went out and did a little research.

Our Method

To figure out the number of book purchases necessary to break even on the Kindle 2, we needed to know the average difference in price between an eBook and a physical book. We also had to take into account that there are several broad categories of books, such as hardcover and paperback, which cost significantly different amounts. Rather than trying to come up with some overall average book price, we broke our study up along the same lines as the New York Times best-seller list—into hardcover fiction, hardcover nonfiction, paperback trade fiction, paperback nonfiction, and paperback mass-market fiction.

For each category, we selected 10 books from the NYT bestseller list. These were generally the top 10, although we had to skip those which weren’t available as Kindle eBooks (a total of 3 out of the 53 that we checked). Once we had our book list, we simply compiled the list price and Kindle eBook price for each title, then did the math to find the average savings. After that, all that was left was to divide the price of the Kindle by the average savings, and we had our break-even number.

Results

What we found about hardcover books came as a bit of a surprise. Both fiction and nonfiction hardback books came in at almost exactly $26 per book, average. For these books, (which tended to be the most recently released) the price for the Kindle eBook versions was a uniform $9.99 across the board. That makes for an average savings of $16 a book, meaning that you only need to buy about 23 books to make up the price of a Kindle 2. That means that if you’re type who loves to read the newest books on the market and can’t wait until they hit paperback, you could very comfortably pay off your Kindle in less than a year, assuming you read a book every two weeks or so.

When it comes to trade paperbacks (the nicer, bigger ones), the discounts get a little less deep. For both fiction and nonfiction trade paperbacks, the average price came out to about $14.50. The Kindle eBooks for these titles were slightly discounted, averaging out at about $8.80, for a savings of about $5.70 per book. At that rate, it would take about 63 purchases to get into the black. That’s quite a few books, but certainly not out of the realm of possibility. People who read a book a week, for instance, could reach this number in just 15 months.

Finally, there’s mass-market paperbacks. These are the smaller, cheaper paperbacks that comprise most genre fiction like sci-fi and fantasy, as well as the popular fiction that you see at drug stores and airports. If you tend to buy mass market paperbacks, either because you’re frugal or because you’re a fan of a certain genre, you’re pretty much out of luck when it comes to saving money with a Kindle. The average savings for one of these books is only $1.29, meaning that you’d have to buy about 280 of them before you break even.

So there you have it; whether or not you can justify buying a Kindle really depends on your current reading habits. If you tend to go for the pricey, hot-off-the-presses hardbacks and you don’t mind giving up that new-book smell, you can pretty easily justify buying a Kindle on money-saving grounds alone. If you tend to wait for books to hit trade paperback, a Kindle will only pay itself off if you’re a prolific reader. Sadly, if the centerpiece of your bookshelf is your collection of Dragonlance books, or you just really love that pulpy, bought-at-a-Walgreens feel, you’re not going to be able to get much of a discount with the Kindle.

 Of course, there's more to a reader than just the physical composition of the books that they read. We've compiled some additional statistics that might help you decide if your favorite author is Kindle-friendly or not.