Amazon’s Exorbitant Kindle Delivery Fees

Amazon charges a whopping 0.15 USD per megabyte delivered (converted from British pounds in Amazon’s example). When I first read this, I thought it meant gigabyte, but no … it’s megabyte. Imagine having to pay 15 cents everytime you downloaded a small photo. Sound unreasonable? I agree.

What does it actually cost Amazon to deliver these precious megabytes for ebooks? One need only look at the cost of Amazon S3, their cloud storage service, to see the true cost and why this is 9000% overpriced.

First, we examine the storage cost. According to Amazon, it’s $0.023 per GB per month stored. Converting to megabytes, we get $0.000023 per MB per month stored. Essentially free for an ebook that’s several MB big.

With storage eliminated as a cost factor, now let’s look at transfer costs for S3. Just making a request costs money, apparently, and it’s $0.005 per 1000 requests. Converting this to a single ebook request, we get $0.000005 to initiate a request to download an ebook. Again, essentially free.

How about for the bandwidth used? Amazon shows $0.09 per GB downloaded. Converting to megabytes, we get $0.00009 per MB downloaded. Now observe the absurdity of the delivery charges for a 3 MB ebook.

Cost to download 3 MB ebook from kindle: $0.15 * 3 MB = $0.45

True cost to Amazon for delivering the ebook: $0.00009 * 3 MB = $0.00027. Essentially free.

Imagine trying to sell an image heavy ebook on Kindle. Impossible.

But wait! Amazon has the 35% royalty option without delivery fees, you might say. Yes, this is true, technically, but a 35% royalty is hilariously low. And that 70% tier? It’s more like 40-50% when you factor in the delivery fees. I’m shocked this hasn’t come up in an anti-trust government case. Amazon’s clause forbidding selling books at a lower price on other platforms at least has, though it doesn’t extend to the delivery fees.

In summary, this is what happens when monopolies grow unchecked. They can charge whatevery they want and extract every drop of money from their users (content creators and customers alike) because they can. Capitalism at its finest. Now you know why Jeff Bezos is so filthy rich.

What does Jeff Bezos do with such funds? A picture is worth one thousand words.