The price of Kindle books continues to baffle.  There are plenty of bargains, but an equal number of titles that seem hugely over-priced.

If you want to know when the prices do drop, then eReaderIQ is a useful service.  You enter the Amazon ASIN code and either a target price or a price drop and they will send you an email notification.

What I find baffling is that so many of the titles on my list have gone up in price, often quite significantly:

Both of Emma Kennedy’s books have fallen in price but haven’t yet reached the rather arbitrary price target I set.

After watching “The Iron Lady” on a plane, I snapped up “The Downing Street Years” for a very reasonable $3.59 (plus $2 surcharge) but baulked at paying $4.49 for the companion volume. It then more than doubled in price and has now reached the giddy heights of $12.99, so I guess I’m going to have to wait for that pleasure.

I’m fairly sure that I don’t need to read Hank Paulson’s self-serving account of the financial crisis, but if it gets cheap enough I suppose I will be tempted.  No sign of that happening, though.

I purchased the second volume of Chris Evans’s autobiography and enjoyed so it, so I put the first volume on price watch, but it has increased since then.  As has Frank Skinner’s autobiography. 

Peter Hennessy’s “Having it So Good: Britain in the Fifties” did drop $2.00 (to $7.99) but the current price is a rather off-putting $15.39.  Strangely, the companion volume about the immediate post-war period increased by $2 at the same time as the first price drop, only to return to $9.99 about a month later.

I have also purchased several titles in paperback because they are cheaper that way – such as Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies ($15.90 on Kindle) and Claire Tomalin’s Dickens biography (a scarcely believable $21.99).