OK, so for a $10 book, Amazon collects 30% for themselves, which is $3.
For a 19MB download delivered via 3G to a Kindle, Sprint, the wireless carrier, charges .15/MB, or $2.85/19MB. This is paid to Sprint, not Amazon.com. The article errors by comparing this fee to the cost for server bandwidth using S3 to come up with his markup value, but S3 bandwidth covers the internet only and does not include fees involved with passing through any sort of cellular network.
If I were to buy the author's book and download it to my non-3G Kindle over my own wi-fi connection, the author would still be charged $2.85 for it.
Surely the 3G Kindle owners should be paying for it - and only then if they use whispernet. Or rather, I always thought they were because the 3G Kindle touch is $50 more expensive. A cellular radio only costs a dollar or two, I always figured that most of the $50 price difference represented average download costs over the expected lifetime.
The article does not say that downloading it over your wi-fi connection will result in $2.58 in delivery fees. It says that the average delivery fee for the book was $2.58.
And that fee would be more reasonable if Amazon allowed authors to provide optimised versions of their book suitable for e-readers that don't have high resolution colour screens.
I don't particularly approve of their pricing, but to be fair the book could be downloaded many times over 3G in the future included in that initial delivery cost.
> Surely the 3G Kindle owners should be paying for it - and only then if they use whispernet.
IMO a fair alternative would be an option for the author to disable Whispernet delivery in exchange for a much lower delivery fee. The system is already set up to do that for audio books.
I am confused as to why the author of the book paying for the download of the end user in the first place? If the end user decides to download it via 3G it should either come out of their existing data allowance or be billed to their phone bill...
... or alternatively they can download it over Wifi and neither the end user, Amazon or the author should pay for it?
What you're missing is that the kindles' 3G is not paid for by the user. It's free and comes with international roaming, something that carriers tend to charge an arm and a leg for.
For a 19MB download delivered via 3G to a Kindle, Sprint, the wireless carrier, charges .15/MB, or $2.85/19MB. This is paid to Sprint, not Amazon.com. The article errors by comparing this fee to the cost for server bandwidth using S3 to come up with his markup value, but S3 bandwidth covers the internet only and does not include fees involved with passing through any sort of cellular network.