Yesterday morning I posted about the oddity that Amazon seemed to be charging more for the Kindle than the hardcover edition of my new book, The Economics of Enough. My esteemed publisher, in the United States, expressed surprise and indeed the Kindle edition is $9.99 on Amazon in the US ($19.53 in the UK though!) versus a $15.49 hardcover price. When I went back to Amazon UK, the anomaly had gone – the Kindle edition is currently showing as £11.88 (it was £12.20 yesterday evening) and the hardcover as £13.20.

(To complicate matters, e-books in the UK attract VAT, added to the list price, whereas physical books do not. This reminds me of the doubtless apocryphal story that imports of animal toys to the EU are subject to a tariff while imports of human figures such as dolls do not, leading to a row about the classification of Star Wars toys.)

However, a bit of slightly random checking suggests the gap between Kindle and hardcover prices is consistently smaller on my side of the Atlantic compared with the US. Maybe somebody from Amazon can explain the policy?

Meanwhile, The Economics of Enough is a bargain at any price and is of course available from all good booksellers!

PS News flash: Amazon Australia is offering an e-version of Enough, and it will also be available via http://www.ebook.com/ on or about 22 February.