The Sword and Laser discussion
Ebook Pricing
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Agree. Even on older books their ridiculous.I can order a used paper back for 39 cents
or buy the ebook version for $12.99.
To be fair, it goes both ways. I found a book today in a book shop that sounded interesting, went to the Amazon Store on my Kindle and it was only 1,60 Euro, so I bought it on the spot.I agree that sometimes the difference between dead-tree books and e-books is ridiculous, but I also found a lot of pretty cheap ebooks (with paperbacks and hardcover still in the "normal" price range).
Amazon habitually lowers its prices to match its competitors. Since its got far fewer competitors in ebooks than in paperbacks there's less pressure on it to be competitive (this is why I no longer shop with Amazon, they might not be evil per ce but the more they become the only store in town the worse the situation for consumers).The other issue is that book prices don't reflect the cost of printing. Simply put, the higher cost of hardbacks is not to compensate for higher printing costs, but to target the price insensitive market who are wiling to pay a premium to avoid wait times for mass market paperbacks. If people want ebooks to be concurrent with hardback release then they'll be priced high, out the whole business model will have to be re done.
The lack of international availability is due to the total mess that its the fragmented English language market. Eg, Tor might have the north America rights, but if Orbit have the UK rights then Tor can't go selling the ebook in the UK... even if no one has the UK rights Tor can't sell the books in the UK without buying the rights, which they won't do without it being worth their while to have an international division. There's some additional messiness here with distribution rights vs publishing rights that I don't totally understand.
All this is horrifically intractable because most books aren't really published by publishing companies, but by publishing divisions within huge companies like newscorp or Disney who are having a larger, angrier row with the internet.
tl;dr don't hold your breath for this to change.
Boilerplate: I don't work in publishing, the above is what I've pieced together from reading everything I can about the subject, quizzing a friend who works for OUP, watching some other friends get published, and some basic primers on economics.
So take it with a pinch of salt.
I agree. I've always thought ebooks were over priced, even years ago when I occasionally bought them for my Palm Pilot. I think we can blame the publishing industry, at least in part. It costs them a lot of money to print books, so they want to sell them. If they don't don't charge outrageous prices for ebooks, no one will buy the hard copies. You might be a few years ahead of the curve, but I think they will come around eventually.
We can also point some fingers at authors who believe that since ebooks are so much easier to steal, they shouldn't publish in that format. While it may be true that ebooks are easier to steal, not publishing in digital format is pointless when it only takes one thief with a scanner to make it available to all the other thieves.
I remember a few years ago when Joanne Rowling refused to publish the Harry Potter novels as ebooks because she was afraid they would get stolen. I couldn't make it past the first book, but if I had wanted the ebooks, I could have downloaded all of them that day--but I wouldn't have been able to pay for them.
Ray Bradbury has been against ebooks for years, but when he recently tried to get Fahrenheit 451 republished, none of the publishers would agree to take it unless they also got the digital rights. If you've ever read Fahrenheit 451, you might see a bit of irony there, but I guess that's a sign that the publishing industry is making an effort to adjust to the new reality.
Our S&L pick Charles Stross has a pretty good ( a little out of date) essay on his blog about what's up with the ebook market, touching more coherently on a lot of what I saidhttp://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-...
Darryl wrote: "
I remember a few years ago when Joanne Rowling refused to publish the Harry Potter novels as ebooks because she was afraid they would get stolen. I couldn't make it past the first book, but if I had wanted the ebooks, I could have downloaded all of them that day--but I wouldn't have been able to pay for them."
Giver her a break, it was 2005, the internets were a scary place back then. She's on the side of the angels now though, Pottermore is going to be selling the ebooks with drm.
Kate wrote: "Giver her a break, it was 2005, the internets were a scary place back then. She's on the side of the angels now though, Pottermore is going to be selling the ebooks with drm."Well, yes. But I wanted to illustrate how the publishing is changing, and I figured that example would be the best one out of the many I've heard. :-)
Though it sure seems like it took her a long time to figure out that fans might actually WANT to pay for her books.
I like that article. Most of it I've seen from other blogs, but it summarizes the issue nicely. I may have to subscribe.
It's interesting to think of the ethics/legality of the recirculation of ebooks v. dead tree books. I sell what books I can to used bookstores and donate what I can't. The books I donate are resold at the Salvation Army type junk shop by my house. I also gift books I've finished on my friends and family fairly frequently. So, my paper books have quite the economic adventure after my initial purchase: they may be resold, given away, traded, resold again, etc. A dozen people may end up reading it without any money going to the original author/publisher. In fact, other people may have made some money off it along the way.When I finish my ebooks, I can't resell them for credit towards new ebooks, I can't loan them to a friend, and I can't give them away. As mentioned above, I also may have paid the same amount for my ebook as I would have for a paper copy.
I think people are used to books being able to circulate more fluidly and since the industry hasn't substantially addressed this issue yet, many people resort to piracy. I think Amazon (and hopefully some new competitors) need to follow Itunes' example of making their content attuned to their users' needs in a way that it started becoming easier and more desirable for people to obtain their music the 'right way.'
It's good that ebooks are available at libraries and I heard that there is a sharing program for Kindle where you can link accounts with a certain number or other people -- that sounds like a good start. I'm definitely looking for more innovation than that, though.
Kate wrote: "Our S&L pick Charles Stross has a pretty good ( a little out of date) essay on his blog about what's up with the ebook market, touching more coherently on a lot of what I saidhttp://www.antipope...."
One thing I take issue with is this bit:
I get this a lot from dedicated ebook readers: "I don't care about formatting and design in ebooks!"
I think this is a peculiar kind of brain damage or mental scarring that mostly afflicts those who have read one too many OCR'd and badly proof-read scans of pirate copies on their Palm III with a 160x160 pixel black and white display. To reach a mass audience, ebooks are going to have to be comparably readable to a dead tree edition: sensible use of screen fonts, layout directives, and some eyeball candy are all part of the package.
No, no, no, please, no. I frelling hate it when publishers add fancy fonts to ebooks. The whole point of an ereader is that I get to control the display, and I set it to a font and size that I find readable. I've had ebooks where the publisher's embedded font is tiny even at my default setting, or where the font is an ugly POS.
By all means, ebooks need formatting, but it's stuff that can be done in HTML with h1, h2, h3, p, i and b tags. That's it. Unless there's a need for some fancy layout, I don't want any formatting beyond paragraph breaks and chapter titles.
Getting rid of typos from scanning in the justified print version would be nice. Theoretically an ebook is the same as html in a webpage, except for word wrapping (when the width is hardcoded -- annoying).
Thanks for the link to the article by Charles Stross very interesting. I want to be clear that I'm not complaining about paying for what I read. It's the (crazy) pricing and the fact that I can't easily buy what I want at the moment due to the seemingly arbitrary rules that are puzzling me at the moment.
Eric Flint wrote a series of articles about the economics of epublishing that I think are well worth reading. I haven't found a link to a free version of them - they were published in the Jim Baen's Universe series.
Jerry Pournelle had some interesting comments also in the last This Week in Tech podcast. He said that he'd most likely self-publish now in the ebook era, and was considering doing that for books coming out of contract.
Bree, I agree with your points. I resisted going down the Amazon path because initially it felt like the early days of iTunes, where you were being locked in to a DRM black hole.When I started reading eBooks it was on a Windows Mobile device and they used the .lit format. I purchased some books from Amazon and they are just gone now. I have no way to get them back.
I haven't tried it out yet, but at least some of the Amazon titles are able to be 'loaned' to friends for a period of time.
And libraries are starting to have ebooks available for loan, although I've yet to find that useful because the number of titles is very limited here.
As I said in my initial post, I've been purchasing from Baen for quite a while and one reason is their policy of no DRM. The thing that finally convinced me to get the Kindle was that I can logon to my Baen collection and send books I've purchased over the past few years to the Kindle.
If you want to try it, you can with the Baen Free Library http://www.baen.com/library/, where they encourage you to get into series and authors by downloading selected titles.
I just noticed that one of my favourite books is now available - Warriors Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold.
Phil wrote: "I've been purchasing from Baen for quite a while and one reason is their policy of no DRM."Baen is awesome. I got an email on Jan. 4 that have moved to http://www.baenebooks.com/.
Have you tried http://www.smashwords.com/ ? It's an indie publishing site, but no DRM, and they offer ebooks in multiple formats. Once you a buy a book, you can download it any time in any format.
Oooo, a new Honor Harrington...
I personally find the ebook pricing models ridiculous. As someone inside the industry It's my opinion that most of it is coming from the publishers. They are incredibly afraid of devaluing their print books and themselves by association.I don't think Amazon was helping at first.. When I first created Kindle versions of my books (3 years ago) I wanted to sell them for .99 or free... But Amazon set the price, just below what they were charging for the print editions.
I really don't see ebooks as being owned, it's more like they're being rented. You're locked into a system with drm and it's a bogus investment in bits. The price should reflect that.
If the publishers don't see this soon they'll be removed from the equation... They're nervous that their gatekeeper position is threatened and they're holding on for dear life.
Thanks Darryl, I hadn't come across Smashwords before. I've signed up now though!Andy, that authors are starting to self-publish, or more specifically let their agents do the publishing was one of the points Jerry Pournelle was making.
He also said that in his opinion it was imperative to retain an external editor as very few authors can self-edit.
My small press editor/publisher is great... the big companies... not so much. Anyone ever been in a corporate meeting with boss's and boss's boss's... does anything good ever come out of a meeting like that? It's rare.Most of the large companies don't have the things they need to face the new challenges. I heard Jerry discussing that on TWiT and he's totally on the mark... he's also had good editorial experiences. That's not always the case.
I'm a little behind on TWiT. I'll have to watch that episode ASAP. I love Jerry. He's right too. I hired a professional editor before I published Bred. It was expensive, but the before and after pictures were very enlightening. Speaking of ebook prices, some of the free stuff on Smashwords is pretty good. N.V. Binder, also a Goodreads user, has a free but short space opera called New Year's Day, which was a lot of fun. She's made it available almost everywhere.
I feel obligated to point out that Amazon doesn't set their e-book prices; the publishers do. In fact, Amazon points that out on just about every Kindle book page; "This price was set by the publisher"
That wasn't always the case. That only happened because of the whole iBooks -agency-model-thing. For the first years, Amazon set the prices. All you could do was "suggest" what they sell it for. I suggested .99. they set the price at 5.99.
Amazon will also change the price without asking if they find it being sold for less somewhere else. Barnes & Noble offers a free ebook every Friday, and Amazon then gives away the same one.
The issue is that with printed books, retailers paid a set rate to publishers (usually 30-40% cover price). So, the publishers didn't care what the book stores sold them for, they still got paid and because of that, so did the authors.Ebooks is a different ball game entirely.
My understanding is that mpany publishers overprice e-books because they prefer selling the paperbacks they spent money to print. The poor proofing of e-books supports this idea.It seems to me a new author would benefit more from an editor with business savvy than a publisher these days. Business minded authors are even better off.
Apple's announcement about e-publishing will change the landscape. The bow tie print industry will be left in the dust.You sell e-books for 99 cents, DRM free.
You'll sell a million copies and
still make more money then you would with print.
Same as what happened with music.
I am surprised at how cost conscious I am. I can't bring myself to buy an ebook that is more than a paperback. And since the new year it seems to me more and more are. I always buy the lower price unless the book is large (so the lightweight Kindle is better) or if I am traveling.
Warren wrote: "Apple's announcement about e-publishing will change the landscape."Except it was apparently Apple that was behind the publishers asking Amazon to raise their prices in the first place..
MSNBC/The Wall Street Journal wrote: "The whole agreement was actually launched at the behest of Apple’s Steve Jobs, who had wanted to create an e-bookstore for the iPad but didn’t want to compete with Amazon.com’s cheap titles."
Full article
Apple encouraging suppliers to jack up the price on the competition.I'm shocked, I tell you shocked!
I know you want to hate Apple, but that's not what happened from what I understand (and experienced).In an effort to get publishers to sign up for the iBook store, Apple said the publishers could charge what they want... Amazon didn't like that at all.
For a while, Amazon even made the PRINT versions vanish from their site of anyone who sided with Apple.
The backlash from this was so big with the tthat eventually Amazon let them charge what they wanted.
So we got more options but lost the low prices.
I certainly wouldn't mind a price war between Apple and Amazon.Maybe even Google could join in the fray.
Something along the lines of what happened with music.
The consumer ends up with cheap DRM free products.
That'll work.
Publishers need to get out of the book "publishing" business and focus on the book "marketing" business.That is where their value is to the author.
Book agents and book editors can handle the rest in the ebook market.
Warren wrote: "I certainly wouldn't mind a price war between Apple and Amazon.Maybe even Google could join in the fray.
Something along the lines of what happened with music.
The consumer ends up with cheap DRM ..."
Except that the publishers won't allow Amazon to charge what they want (and Apple doesn't want to set prices themselves), so it's impossible for anyone to compete on price with ebooks. The publishers said you either sell it for what we say or we'll just pull all our books.
This is why most books above the $9.99 price on Amazon say "This price was set by the publisher".
This is probably one of the only times in history where more competition (Apple joined in the ebook business) resulted in a price increase across the board.
There is competition from independent publishers. More and more authors are leaving or avoiding the big publishers and going indie. This will probably result is lower quality books, but there will be a lot more of them at a lot lower prices, and readers will sort them out. If the big guys sticks with high prices for ebooks, they might eventually loose.
True, but if they stay on this path they'll end up like Kodak.Sooner or later some one will release 'Do it your self" software.
Then the book will go from the author to the editor/agent to the distributer. The publishers end up filing Chapter 11
The dragon page cover to cover podcast has switched to a 'how to do your own ebooks' theme.
Two years ago I gave away (to a good cause) eight big boxes of books, some of which I'd owned for a very long time. Now I was looking at having to do it again because the shelves were chockablock.
I've always liked the idea of ebooks. I've been buying them for years, but wouldn't have considered totally going over to them until the latest Kindle came out. It converted me and I declared that I would no longer purchase fiction on paper.
The problem I've found in the last few months though, is that Amazon is extraordinarily restrictive and, perhaps, profiteering.
Firstly, living in Australia, I only have access to a small subset of the books available in the USA. Secondly, I can't purchase Kindle books from Amazon France at all (Heaven forfend that someone should be interested in reading in more than one language!). And thirdly I'm starting to see books in Kindle format costing more than hard copy books, which defeats the whole rationale as I understood it!
Take the latest S&L pick for example. On Amazon I can order the Stross Rule 34 for $US7.99 in paperback, but they want to charge me $US20.82 for the Kindle edition!!!
WTF!?