The article does not say that downloading it over your wi-fi connection will result in $2.58 in delivery fees. It says that the average delivery fee for the book was $2.58.
Amazon apply the fee regardless of delivery method. Check out the link posted by kennethcwilbur elsewhere in this thread.
https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26O...
Amazon charge $0.15/MB and the book was approximately 18MB in size.
And that fee would be more reasonable if Amazon allowed authors to provide optimised versions of their book suitable for e-readers that don't have high resolution colour screens.
Re:Amazon Digital Markup: 129,000%
by frozenflame on Monday June 11, 2012 @11:58PM
(#4098660)
I don't particularly approve of their pricing, but to be fair the book could be downloaded many times over 3G in the future included in that initial delivery cost.
> Surely the 3G Kindle owners should be paying for it - and only then if they use whispernet.
IMO a fair alternative would be an option for the author to disable Whispernet delivery in exchange for a much lower delivery fee. The system is already set up to do that for audio books.
Surely the 3G Kindle owners should be paying for it - and only then if they use whispernet. Or rather, I always thought they were because the 3G Kindle touch is $50 more expensive. A cellular radio only costs a dollar or two, I always figured that most of the $50 price difference represented average download costs over the expected lifetime.