I think that I want an Amazon Kindle.  As a self-professed early adopter of gadgets, the Kindle should certainly rank near the top of my list.  I wish the product did more (touch screen, color, play movies, etc.) but I’ll just have to wait for the future Apple tablet to give me another multimedia toy.   At $299 it is also fairly expensive as noted by many reviewers, but that hasn’t stopped me from buying cool technology before.

So why haven’t I taken the plunge?  Because I have at least a dozen actual books on my shelf that I haven’t read yet, and the thought of having to buy those books again in their e-format is too much of a disincentive.  I’m always at least 12 books behind, since I buy books that I know I’ll want to read even if it will be a few months before I get to them.

I wonder how many other people are like me?  It is an interesting look into the psychology of making purchasing decisions.  In my case the $299 price tag isn’t keeping me away, and the cost of purchasing future books for $9.99 certainly isn’t a disincentive (since that price is less than the cost of a regular book).  But I just can’t get over the idea of re-buying 5 or more books that are sitting on my shelf unread, even if they would only add an additional $50 to the price.

(Yes, I do realize that I don’t actually have to buy the e-formats since I can just read the hardcopy versions that I have… but do you think I’m going to buy this cool new toy and then not want to use it for several months as I get through my paper backlog?)

There is an obvious solution to this problem, and I’m surprised that Amazon hasn’t already done it.  Since I already buy all of my books on Amazon anyway, they have a history of my recent purchases. Depending on how generous they wanted to be, they could either:

1. Automatically give me the e-versions of my last 6 books purchased;
2. Offer to give me a discount (say, 50%?) on the e-versions of my last 6 books purchased; or
3. Let me ship back my last 6 books purchased that are unread and get a credit equal to the cost of the e-versions.

What would those options cost?  Let’s assume that an e-book costs $10, a regular book costs $20, and their profit margin is 50% on both (too high I’m sure, but it makes for a simpler calculation).  Let’s also assume that the average user buys the e-versions of 2 books that they already own and haven’t ready yet (though I doubt most people would be as crazy as me).

With Option 1, under our assumptions I would have purchased 2 books for a profit of $10; instead Amazon needs to pay the publishers $30 – so the net cost to Amazon is $40.

With Option 2, the only cost to Amazon is the $10 opportunity cost of the 2 books that I would have bought.

With Option 3, Amazon gets 6 books back that they can resell; since they’ve already paid the publisher for those books, the entire resale price is Amazon’s profit. Even if only 50% of them are in good condition for resell, their profit on those 3 books is $60.  We established in Option 1 that the cost of giving me the e-versions of all 6 books is $40 – so Amazon has made $20 in profit from this promotion, and gotten me to buy my Kindle. In fact, depending on the actual costs it seems possible that Amazon could accept back any unread book in exchange for the Kindle e-book version.

Let’s remember that Amazon knows so much about my purchases that they probably know what I’m going to purchase before I do.   Some data-digging to find users that (1) buy a lot of books, (2) spend a lot on certain types of technology and gadgets, that (3) don’t already own a Kindle, and I would be at the top of that list.  Even if they didn’t want to make this a widespread promotion, why not send it to a targeted group as a trial and evaluate the results?

(Image from Gizmodo).