Aayush Arya is India Editor and Apps Co-Editor at I just purchased a book with a price of $40 in USA for $6 on an online bookstore in India. Those are savings of 85%! This is why I find the non-regionalised prices of digital media absolutely unfair. A Kindle book that costs $10 in USA should cost no more than $2.30 in India and an App Store app that costs $2 in USA should cost $0.45 in India. And the prices should be listed on these online stores in INR.
The only reason these prices seem to be absurdly low is because they are written in US dollars. But if something costs a dollar in the United States, it has no business costing over Rs. 10 in India. The value an Indian places over ten rupees is roughly similar to that which an American places over a dollar.
This is not simply a complaint about stuff being expensive, it’s a complaint about it being made artificially expensive. As it stands today, you can choose to buy an actual physical copy of a book, one that you can display on a real bookshelf and allow your friends to borrow, for much less in India than its virtual counterpart. The very idea is absurd.
If traditional publishers can pass on the savings made possible by local publication of books on to the customer, there is no reason why publishers of digital books can’t lower their arbitrarily set prices to account for the lower average incomes of customers in developing countries. There aren’t even any costs associated with mass publication and distribution of these books (bandwidth costs do exist but they are negligible compared to actually printing and shipping physical copies of books all around the globe).
By going digital, an Indian is not only paying a much higher upfront cost, they’re also shelling out significantly more money per book. No matter how convenient the searching, space-saving and automatic bookmarking features of electronic readers may be, they are not enough to justify paying ten times more (than the traditional option) for virtual copies of any book.
