2 E-Books Cost More Than Amazon Hardcovers

Readers of e-books may not be able to turn paper pages, lend their copies to friends or file them away on living room bookshelves. But they do have the comfort of knowing that they paid less for them than for hardcovers. Unless they bought "Fall of Giants" by Ken Follett, which was published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Group USA, last week.

On Amazon.com, the price for the e-book was $19.99; the hardcover edition was $19.39. Or "Don't Blink," by James Patterson and Howard Roughan, whose publisher, Little, Brown & Company, charged $14.99 for the e-book. Amazon priced the hardcover at $14. Customers, unaccustomed to seeing a digital edition more expensive than the hardcover, howled at the price discrepancy, and promptly voiced their outrage with negative comments and one-star reviews on Amazon. "Really, James Patterson?" wrote one reader from Elgin, Ill. "Why would it possibly cost more for a digital download than printed and bound ink on paper?" Other customers directed their anger at the publishers. "They aren't penguins," a Web commenter from Paradise, Calif., wrote about Mr. Follett's book. "They are pigs." Several major publishers said those two books were the first they knew of that cost more as e-books than in hardcover on Amazon.