A Kindle in every pot

[ksmith]

An interesting short article in
AmericaBlog:


"You see, in Greece, the government pays for 99% of students' books. So, Papandreou argues, why not give the kids every book in existence for a hundred bucks (or $360 in the case of the Kindle)."

Think if they did that in the States. Or worldwide. How many school-aged kids are there anyway?

I can see the methods for calculating advances and royalties might be revisited...

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

What a lovely dream! My kids regularly lug huge weights to school because their books are heavy. My older son got his very first book on CD this year. It's much lighter to carry a dozen books on his laptop than one text. I keep hoping we can get them all on CD.

Adrianne

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

A guaranteed market for every book. A huge market. I don't know if it's possible, and the economics would be really interesting. Every book is distributed to tens of millions. Every book.

[(Anonymous)]

Where would you start reading? How would you choose what's next?

And what would it gain you? If every book sold tens of millions of copies, what would you get paid? A hundredth of a penny each? Certainly most individuals couldn't afford to pay a decent price for each book in the library of congress. And while the government could/has managed to do it once, they couldn't do it for every school kid in the country... The books would have to be heavily discounted, or even sent out for free.

A

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I imagine that package deals would be worked out between publishers and the device seller(s). Given the volumes, the devices could probably be marked down significantly, as could the books. A hundredth of a penny seems low for 10 million copies, since odds are you're wiping out most future sales.

I have no idea how to price these things.