Last week when Amazon officially unveiled the new Kindle UK ebook store, I compared some of Amazon’s ebook prices with WHSmith and found that Amazon had much lower prices in most cases. Here’s the post with the information about Kindle UK and the price comparisons.
So now WHSmith is countering by cutting their prices by 35% on the top 100 fiction ebooks. And they’ve also cut the price of the Sony Reader Pocket Edition down to £99, matching Waterstone’s new price.
A quick look at some of WHSmith’s new prices compared to those on Amazon UK reveals that they are still a little bit higher for some of the more popular titles, but only by a few cents (or is it pence?).
Kudos to the folks in charge at WHSmith. It’s a good start. They needed to do something to stand up to Amazon. By making their top 100 fiction titles pretty much the same price as Amazon’s, not to mention that WHSmith’s ebooks are the more open and accessible Adobe format that can be used on all kinds of ereaders (they also have a few MOBI and Microsoft LIT ebooks too), and lowering the price of the Sony PRS-300 (a good basic reader) that at least gives WHSmith a chance to become a worthy competitor in the UK.