eBook prices investigated

With no pages to print, no heavy books to cart around and no shop needed to sell them, you'd expect eBooks to cost less than their printed cousins. However, there's often little between them in price. One reason for this is that, incomprehensibly, eBooks are subject to VAT (currently a whopping 20%), while printed books are not.

You might also expect that they'd be available sooner for similar reasons to those above, but the reality is somewhat disappointing. Generally speaking, you can only download an eBook on the day that the hardback equivalent lumbers into shops.

In mid-August, we took the top 10 bestseller list as compiled by Neilsen Bookscan and compared the price of each in paperback and eBook formats sold online by Amazon.co.uk, Waterstones and WH Smiths. We also compared the hardback release date against the Kindle and ePUB releases. Nine of the 10 bestsellers had been available to download on the hardback publication date, but in the case of Kathy Reichs' Spider Bones, electronic users had .........

http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/ereaders/1288702/ebook-prices-investigated