It seems the major problem here is that brick and mortar stores have lost sight of the fact that customers don’t always just care about prices, they want service too. Being in a unique position to offer personalized service, you would think this is where most brick and mortar stores would excel and differentiate themselves from online retailers. Instead, it seems that they are falling back on the obvious advantage of convenience and immediate gratification. If you need something today, it makes more sense to go to a brick and mortar store than it does an online retailer. They really should try to reach for higher than that…

The higher price of a lot of ebooks has irked me for some time now, but there’s a legitimate reason for it, even if it doesn’t seem to make sense ultimately: ebooks are marked up differently than physical books, and that creates these weird pricing anomalies where sometimes it costs $5 less to get a huge hardcover shipped to your front door than it does to download a small handful of ones and zeroes.

There’s an article out there that explains this in full and I’ll try to locate it. But there’s also a bit of it discussed here in this Quora post: http://www.quora.com/Why-are-eBooks-often-more-expensive-than-paperback-or-hardcover-books

Definitely strange times.

I’m on the US side of life, but I hadn’t even considered how the currency fluctuations would impact pricing, although I did notice that many recent books still have a higher Canadian price than US awhile back. I had assumed it was a shipping cost/import fee kind of thing.

Interesting post.

Everyone else is there