The eBooks are Too Damn Expensive!

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I got an iPad last week, and I intend to use it primarily as a book reader. Naturally I wanted to download a book and try it out, so I bought Matt Yglesias’s new Kindle single, The Rent is Too Damn High. So far, I’m very pleased with the book-reading abilities of the iPad1, but I wonder if publishers are setting too high a price for these miniature volumes? Matt’s book is $3.99, and in one sense that’s cheap. It’s about the price of a magazine, and has a roughly similar amount of content. On the other hand, you could also say it’s more similar to a single magazine article — a long one, granted — and people aren’t generally willing to pay four bucks for one article.

Unless you’re a big name, or you happen to generate some serious buzz, it seems as if these kinds of books might do better as impulse buys. Maybe 99 cents, or $1.99. On the other hand, the real investment here is time more than money, and for anyone willing to spend three or four hours reading something like this, three or four dollars shouldn’t be much of a hurdle.

I guess I’m not sure. Maybe all I really wanted was a chance to write the headline for this post. But I’m curious to get some feedback. Has price ever deterred you from downloading any Kindle singles? Or is this a non-issue?

1My big problem with the original Kindle was that it sucked for nonfiction books. Tables, charts, and images of all sorts rendered so badly as to be nearly illegible. But the Kindle app for the iPad appears to have solved this problem. My test case was A Farewell to Alms, and although some of the images were surprisingly low-res, they were all readable. And the tables were all readable too: columns actually lined up properly and pages are big enough to have enough to room show the entire thing. So far, so good.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

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If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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