When you take a look at the best-seller list, there are some interesting things to be seen as we are on the brink of an all out e-book price war. Let’s take the 5 top sellers and compare the price of the physical book and the price of the Kindle edition.

*Book Price from Barnes and Noble before Member Discount

So the $25,000 question, and the one I do not have the answer to, is how do you quantify the cost for the publisher to print the book, artwork, etc. AND turn a profit for both the publisher and the book seller.

The difference in purchase price for digital books seems to be somewhere under $4 for paperback books, and $8-10 for hardcover books. That’s with Amazon’s prices. If you go by the $10-15 that Apple is negotiating with publishers, it would $-3 to $.75 for paperbacks and $1.20 to $3.66.

I can totally understand wanting to make as much profit as possible, that’s how business runs, but the common sense logic would be that since the publisher no longer has to print, store and transport a physical copy of the book, then we are literally talking about just the profit for the publisher and the reseller.

That makes me feel a little uncomfortable with the pricing Apple is contending. I’ll be potentially paying MORE for a book than the physical paperback costs if they are $10-15, and I’ll be literally saving $1-3 by purchasing the electronic version of a hardcover book.

When you look at the benefits a physical book has, namely the ability to loan it or potentially sell it back to a book buyer, this starts to get really murky.

That leaves us with the final question. Is e-Book delivery a natural progression of reading, or a convenience we should expect to pay a “convenience fee” for?

It’s a slippery slope and one that has already been set with digital downloads of Movies and Music. It’s not at all uncommon for the digital, protected and MUCH less flexible version of music and movies to sell for just a little bit less than the physical copy.

I don’t like it, I don’t like it one bit.