StephWills.com

Well, it’s hap­pened. Kin­dle prices have unhinged from real­ity. Check this out:

Yeah, I can pur­chase the paper­back for $9.89 and have it shipped to my house for free, sec­ond day. Think about what that entails. It involves a per­son retriev­ing the book from Amazon’s ware­house, box­ing it, send­ing an order to UPS, a UPS dri­ver pick­ing it up, dri­ving it to the air­port, fly­ing the book across sev­eral states (pos­si­bly involv­ing more than one flight, which involves many other peo­ple mov­ing the book from place to place), some­one putting the pack­age on a truck, and some­one to drive that truck to my house. The sheer effort involved is staggering.

Or, for $10.99 — $1.10 more, I can pur­chase it for my Kin­dle, which involves me down­load­ing the book to my Kin­dle. Much less human effort, gaso­line, pol­lu­tion, etc.

And yet it costs me more in order to accom­plish less.

I’m still try­ing to wrap my brain around it. Some­where, some­one is get­ting screwed. And it feels like that some­one is me.

Tags: kin­dle, Read­ing