When Amazon announced its India store, we conducted a poll and asked if you’d buy the “dead tree edition” or an e-book. More than one third of voters said that they would buy an ebook only if they offer major discounts and nearly one out of five said that they will only buy e-books. Two out of five said that they prefer physical books.
Assuming that Chetan Bhagat is “the biggest selling English language novelist in India’s history” (disagree?) and that Flipkart is the gold standard in e-tailing physical books, we horsed around a bit, trying to find if there are any “major discounts” around.
Here’s what we came up with (including cheapest price from other book stores, for which the data has been sourced from Mysmartprice.com).
| Chetan Bhagat on | Kindle | Flipkart | Cheapest |
| What Young India wants | Rs 81.57 | Rs 98 | 91 |
| Revolution 2020 | Rs 80.40 | Rs 91 | 90 |
| Two States | Rs 80.40 | Rs 98 | 98 |
| Five Point Someone | Rs 84.5 | Rs 98 | 95 |
| 3 Mistakes of my Life | Rs 83.33 | Rs 98 | 94 |
| One Night at a call center | Rs 85.68 | Rs 98 | 83 |
| All together | Rs 495.88 | Rs 469 (combo) | 469 (by all stores) |
Aside, popular classics like A Tale of Two Cities, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice among others are free on Amazon while you have to pay to buy the physical copy.
EBooks Vs. Physical Edition?
The quest continues. Maybe ebooks aren’t likely to kindle anyone’s fire yet (in India), eh? If that snap poll is anything to go by (poll is embedded in the post, will be active till this weekend) – most, at least for now, will continue buying physical books and at best wait for much much better pricing on ebooks to make the shift.
Newton’s First Law got it right about inertia!
What are your thoughts?
[poll id=”12″]
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