Amazon or Kobo?

I'm struggling with reviewer's block. An extremely severe case. My best efforts at writing any new reviews come down to me scribbling "Is good" in crayon over my notes, and I can barely even manage that. So I'm taking a bit of a break, playing with new toys (I just got a Kobo Glo) and buying all the books.

The arrival of the Kobo Glo sparked an idea. I've compared Kobo and Amazon's ebook prices in the past, but that was based on a random sample of ebooks and might not have been all that indicative of general usage, especially since it didn't take Kobo's discount coupons into account. Armed with the list of 78 ebooks I've purchased during the year from Kobo (excluding those not available on both platforms) I've decided to revisit that comparison.

The list of ebooks would be too long to repeat here so I'm just going to post the totals from each retailer and the total of my actual purchases using Kobo's discount coupons. Amazon charges in USD, so prices where converted to ZAR using an exchange rate of R10.41.

Store:	Total
Amazon:	R 10465.59
Kobo (retail)	R 9533.17
Kobo (with coupons)	R 1831.58

While Amazon offered the cheapest prices for 18 of the 78 (23%) titles purchased, they turned out to be the most expensive overall. Based on the retail prices Kobo was still 9.87% cheaper than Amazon, but the most remarkable difference come into play when you take the Kobo discount coupons into account. Over the year I've used lots of discount coupons ranging from 35% to 95% off, and the end result shows what a huge saving their cumulative effect can have. With the coupons taken into account Amazon is 571.57% more expensive than Kobo!

When deciding on which ereader to choose you have to pay attention to the hardware device itself, but a far more important consideration is the actual content store the device is tied to. In South Africa the Kindle is still the first thing people think about when they hear ereaders mentioned, but Kobo is slowly gaining ground.

Personally I prefer Kobo since they charge in Rand, their ereaders are much cheaper than Kindles and, as clearly demonstrated, their coupons offer amazing value for money. You'd be silly not to keep that in mind when you have to decide on which ereader to get.

Viva Kobo, viva! Your discount coupons play havoc with my budget and my Olympus Mons of a TBR-pile, but I love you for it!

Addendum:
This has been written from a South African perspective. Publishers in different regions might not allow for discount coupons to be used on their titles, so the difference the coupons make will vary according to your region and whether your favorite publishers allow them or not.