Soooo... during the merry month of August, while most of the world is on holiday, the revolution may have happened.

As Tom Tivnan observes, Amazon have priced themselves into a rather powerful position. The Amazon Kindle Store UK has opened, and the top one hundred books are, um, cheap. Very, very cheap. They're not just old favourites finding a new life, either, but new or newish books. Interestingly Peter Mandelson's Third Man is on at over ten quid. Other than that, it's under a tenner and for the most part under a fiver.

So I haven't thought a great deal about this, but here are my first reactions:

1. These are for the most part the vanilla ebooks I talked about when I talked about pricing a while ago. ('scuse the ridiculous Fight Club motif. I have no idea what came over me.) There's still room, possibly, for ebooks priced higher on first release and ebooks at a higher level because they contain additional material.

2. I guess this is where we find out whether volume of sales makes up for reduced price.

3. I have no idea whether this is sustainable anyway. Who's making a loss if one is being made? Amazon? Publishers? (Authors?) Is this a giant, aggressive loss-leader or a genuine pricing strategy?

4. Will this affect paper books (the publishing/bookselling nightmare)? Or will it turn out that people differentiate?

5. If publishers have lent themselves to this, after all that complaining about deep discounting and all that fretting about digital books devaluing paper books and the concept of the book... Well, yeesh. I don't know. That would just be weird. I would start saying things like "royalty floor".

6. If this comes as a (nasty?) surprise, then I would hope to see some pushback. Which presently I do not. 

7. Apple will be all over this like a bearcub on salmon mousse.

8. We need clear pricing structures which are easily understood by bookbuyers and which don't change all the time. People need to be able to compare prices and understand in order to feel happy about buying. So for example: first three weeks, book not priced under a tenner. First six months not under a fiver. Thereafter, whatever. Or something. I'm not saying everyone has to adopt the same system, just that some general sense of what a book costs is necessary.

9. Bundling ebook and paper looks better and better to me all the time.

10. I need breakfast and because it's August I doubt anyone will read this anyway. (Yes, I know it's nearly midday, I got sidetracked.) Final thought: I want to know whether there are books available in the US store to which I am still signed up which are not available here. That's not quite clear to me. If there are, then a) that's a bit irritating and mad and b) I am content to pay extra to have access to them.

Which is interesting.