In my ongoing quest to find ebooks I actually want to read, I was pleasantly surprised to find Fiona Capp’s book on Judith Wright My Blood’s Country was available in ebook format. Hooray Allen&Unwin but – oh, no – you have to go and find it on one of the 11 ebook seller sites they link off the A&U site. (How come A&U don’t know who’s selling their ebooks?) Anyway off I go tapping away. Surprisingly (or not so surprising she says cynically) those Oz sites you’d expect to stock (store?) an Australian title don’t have it ie Borders, Angus and Robertson, Dymocks and Kobo. Whitcoulls the NZ site didn’t have it either. When I did find the book, the prices were wildly varied (the pbook RRP is $27.99):
- Waterstones (UK) £17
- Ebooks.com (US) $20
- Books on Board (US) $15
- Kindle (US) $12
- Read Without Paper (Oz) AUD $25
- W H Smith (UK) £13.
I suppose to wide variance in price reflects the AUD exchange rate, but the good news is that ebooks can be significantly cheaper than the pbook and available simultaneously with the pbook release (the release date for the Capp pbook was December 2010).
There is a website (www.booko.com.au) that will compare pbook prices for a given title across the range of online sellers. I would be great if this service was extended to ebooks