I found this post by Andrew Hyde quite interesting. I’ve never paid much attention to Amazon’s delivery costs because they’re so cheap for a fiction book file. When you’ve got nothing but text and a cover image to send, the delivery fee is minimal. For my books it’s four or five cents per delivery.
I’m sure that someone who knows more about this would tell me that even the rate I’m paying is outrageous given the incredibly small file size for my books, but at a few cents a pop, I’m not complaining.
But Hyde is paying $2.58 to have his 18 megabyte file delivered. That just feels outrageous. His book has a lot of photos, which results in the much larger file size. I’m sure the rate he’s paying is just the mathematical result of Amazon’s formula, but it feels like a gotcha.
It’s like the outrageous rates hotels charge for long distance phone calls. You know it costs them almost nothing for you to make a 20 minute call across the country, but they charge you $45 as though they haven’t updated their contract with the phone company since the 1930s.
It’s information superhighway robbery.
