The most expensive e-book | Hacker News Reader

The most expensive e-book

amazon.com

14 pointspotomak21 comments

The interesting thing with Kindle books (self-publishing) is if you price the book between $2.99 and $9.99, your commission is 70%. But if you price it over or under that range, it's only 35%.

So a $7400 book would be $4810 for Amazon and only $2590 for the author.

It's not an e-book, and among paper books it's not even close: a bidding war between two pricing algorithms famously led to a $23 MILLION price tag: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2384102,00.asp

I wouldn't be surprised if something similar has happened in this case as well, and there may have been more extreme cases before.

The real gold is always in the reviews section of an item like this.

Hilarious !!!

I don't know if the price is hidden to me because I'm in the UK, but that one is apparently only available in hardback.

This one, however... http://www.amazon.com/International-Encyclopedia-Social-Beha...

$16,315.96 on Kindle.

I see Nuclear Energy at $7,400.50 that's $12 per page. The Encyclopedia on the other hand is at $11,382.09 but with 17500 pages costs a little over $1.5 per page.

On my Amazon site it was $16,870. Hmmm. Should I buy a car or this ebook?

That book is a famous reference book, it's not supposed to be bought by individuals, but by university libraries. The price is so high because a more reasonable price would be a "drop in the ocean" for a typical library, and they might as well give it away for free then. So they choose a price as high as the libraries can pay.

It reminds me a bit of the pricing of scientific journals. They are basically just magazines, but horrendously expensive because they are marketed towards libraries. The difference to this is that you can buy individual articles. To keep the libraries buying, they also put a ridiculous price on the articles, like $45 a piece. People are not supposed to buy them individually either, its just to keep the price up (and the articles formally available).

I don't know if this is the case for this book, but really interesting article about how some items on Amazon can get outrageous prices

http://www.dansdata.com/gz146.htm

The e-book (kindle-edition) is not available where I live, but I see I can acquire a hardcopy for just $7,400.50.

That's literally a steal! Actually, double so!

And it has been consistently expensive. http://camelcamelcamel.com/Nuclear-Energy-Landolt-B%C3%B6rns...

The book is available in hardcover only so it's not the most expensive e-book ...

Bit I guess when you're serious about nuclear energy, 7500$ is probably relatively cheap ;-)

I think it's available in hardcover only if you are outside the US.

It also says 3 volumes, so it is 3 books.

Best Customer Reviews I have ever seen for a book.

not sure if the link is affiliate spam, in any case here is a stripped down sanitised one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B001C2TPWO/

I think the chances of someone buying this book from the link provided is slim to none, so affiliate link or not doesn't really matter.

--learned something new about Amazon affiliate links. Thanks for the corrections guys!

Isn't the affiliate cookie a XX-day cookie? Place it now, and if I buy a completely unrelated book, you'll still get the commission? Because then it is valuable to place those links here.