I went to the Kindle store to pre-order the new Lucas Davenport book by John Sandford.
It cost $14.99.
I bought my Kindle because I thought the books would be about $10. That’s what they almost all were (or cheaper).
How did the price go up by a third in a couple of years?
Is the Internet suddenly more expensive?
What gives?
The publisher set the Kindle edition price.
It’s a new title. I’m looking at the Amazon.com website. The hardcover edition of the new book is actually less than the Kindle edition, while older titles by that author are available in Kindle edition for $9.99.
I’ve seen a number of instances where the Kindle version was either about the same price as, or even more expensive than, the hardcover. Seems to be quite prevalent in nonfiction - which was what I wanted the Kindle for. (Most fiction, I’ll check out of the library, because I’m only going to read it once. There’s little reason to own a book in any format anymore that you’re not likely to re-read.)
I, too, am wondering exactly why I bothered to buy a Kindle.
This.
Originally, Amazon priced Kindle books, and they kept them around $10.
But the publishers raised a big stink about a year or so ago, and nowadays they set the prices on Kindle books. And yes, they are around the same price as the hardcover in a lot of cases.
I agree, it sucks.
Is it too early to regret buying mine? I’ve only had it a week.
It’s bullshit, no doubt about that. However, I’ve found that with the amount of out of copyright books I’ve read for free, plus a few promotions giving away ebooks, I’ve probably come out on top compared with the cost of buying all of them in paper form.
Not if I’d just used my library, admittedly, but I’m still glad I got my eReader. Once I have run out of classics and need to start buying books again, I’ll be in the same boat - already I’m putting off buying books that I want because paying the same for an electronic version is offputting. It’s the same reason I don’t buy games on Steam unless they’re on sale - and fair play to Steam, they have sales every few weeks.
They really need to embrace the nature of digital distribution. They’d find that most people actually spend more money when things are cheaper, I think. PC games, as a leading example, are mostly digital distribution, and they find that giving people games for cheap ends up making them buy a lot more games than they thought they would - they might only be paying $10 per game on average, but they buy 10 games at that price instead of 1 at $50. Since the marginal cost of transferring another book is practically nothing, they need to experiment with low priced books and see how it affects sales. 100 copies sold at $5 is better than 30 sold at $10.
I figure they should do the same with music too - if I could buy albums for $4, I’d spend significantly more on music than I do now, several times.
Anyway, that’s the primary thing keeping me from getting a kindle - no way do I want to pay retail prices. Give me $3-5 books and I’d get one.
And yet, I could get a printed copy for $9.99 through BOMC2.
As Athena explained, Amazon used to set the prices at about $10 each, but about a year ago the publishers complained, so nowadays they’re frequently more than that.
I can understand the publishers not wanting to kill the market for hardcovers by pricing new releases way lower on the Kindle than in print. But, I think their prices on many older releases are ridiculously, nonsensically high; I frequently see print editions for sale on Amazon that are cheaper than the electronic editions.
I wholeheartedly agree. I suspect, and hope, that pricing models for e-books will get more reasonable and realistic in the not-too-distant future. Right now I don’t think publishers have yet figured out how to price and market their e-books.
Personally, since I got my Kindle last year, most of the books I’ve read on it have been either public domain titles or freebies from Amazon. I’ve bought a few at “full price,” but only when that price was under $10.
Nitpick: A book that has gone from $10 to $14.99 has gone up 1/2, not 1/3.
It’s annoying, but it’s also pretty normal. If you are going to order a book before it’s even out, of course they’ll charge more. They know you want it more than most people. If you’re willing to wait a year or for sales, you’ll likely find the price closer to a paperback or possibly even less.
Most of the books I’ve purchased for my Nook have been under $10. I got the first two in A Song of Ice and Fire for $5 each. The fourth was priced closer to $15 so I read it on my Nook by borrowing from my library. Now, all four are priced at $9 but the one coming out in June is priced at $15.
Kindle-shcmindle, second-hand book stores are the way to go.
In my opinion, it’s another example of publishers refusing to face reality.
Publishing is based on the concept of selling the package: the book, the CD, the DVD, etc. You buy the package to get the content: the novel, the song, the movie, etc. But technology is moving on. It’s becoming increasingly easy to obtain the content independent of the package.
Publishers should be attempting to develop new models of selling and delivering content. They could lower their costs and increase their sales. But the downside is that these new methods would hurt the sales of the old package methods.
So publishers are trying to maintain an artificial economy. They want the government to prohibit any form of content sales they don’t control. And they want to raise the price of these new forms of content sales to artifically high prices so their old package-based sales will still be competitive. (Plus creating higher profits from the new technology sales.)
But you can’t stop the tide. These new methods exist and their advantages are too clear for consumers to ignore them. The new technology will get used and if publishers refuse to particiapte, they’re going to end up getting shut out of the marketplace.
Just do what I do, and refuse to buy anything over $9.99. Anything else, I get from the library. I can wait for a book to be available, rather than pay an exorbitant price. Also, post a one-star review telling them the price is too high; not that anybody gives a damn.
For many years people have complained that all books were priced the same. A bestseller cost just as much as an obscure tome. (Same for movies.) Now publishers have caught on and are pricing books higher that people want, right now, immediately, and charging less for other books.
And what do people do? They complain.
It is to laugh.
The notion that if you just drop the price for everything, then everything will sell better is not a real-world concept. The amount of money people are willing to spend total on books probably doesn’t have great elasticity. If you make books cheaper the number of books sold may go up but the total amount of money spent probably won’t. (Most people already buy as many books as they’re going to buy. A few people might buy more, but the ones who buy a book or two a year - the majority - won’t suddenly buy 6 or 10.) All that lowering the price across the board means is that the producers get less per sale. Why should they be happy about this?
We’ve already seen the result. Hundreds of thousands of books at $2.99, or $1.99, or $0.99 are flooding Kindle. The people who buy 1 or 2 books a year are more likely to go for known authors in such a world, which is why the James Patterson fiction factory had seven bestsellers in 2010. Every extra million books sold by Patterson is a million less sold by other writers, because total books sales are stable and have been for years.
If you want good books, pay more for them, not less.
I know you’re involved in the publishing business but I still question some of what you posted.
Lowering costs doesn’t increase sales? That’s an amazing statement that goes against pretty much all economic knowledge. Even in the book trade - there are several chains that specialize in selling discounted remainders.
And I’ll also dispute your claim that publishers will get less per sale. We’re not talking about book sales here - the topic is sales of e-text. The production cost in much lower. So a publisher should be able to drastically lower the price and still make the same profit per unit. And this, combined with the increased number of units being sold due to the lowered price, will make the publisher more profit. And the author will also benefit because he’s getting paid a royalty per sale, so more sales equals more money to him. And the customer’s happy because he’s paying a lower price.
So who’s losing? The people who are trying to sell paper editions of that same book. It’s going to get increasingly difficult to convince a customer to pay twenty dollars for a paper copy of a book when he can get an electronic copy of that same book for two dollars.
But as I said in my previous post, the technology isn’t going to go away. Somebody is going to sell those electronic books. If publishers are smart they’ll make sure it’s themselves.
I see no evidence that publishers have “caught on” to anything. Have they really changed the way they set their prices recently?
I, for one, am not complaining about publishers charging more for books that “people want, right now, immediately.” I’m complaining about publishers continuing to charge such high prices for electronic versions of books even after the printed versions become readily available more cheaply. (This is especially complainworthy when the electronic versions are full of scanning errors, but that’s a side issue.) It just seems like it would be in the publisher’s own best interest to price their books low enough so that I’d buy the e-book rather than look for a cheap used or remaindered or library copy.
Do you have any evidence for this? I, for one, am a sucker for cheap books and have bought lots and lots of books that I would not have bought if they had been more expensive—but I’m not necessarily typical.
I wish you wouldn’t do that: it’s ineffective and dickish. It just makes it harder for the prospective Amazon customer to tell whether the book itself is any good.
If it’s really a “one-star”-quality bookI wouldn’t want to buy it at any price, so who cares what the price is.
It’s dickish for the publisher to charge that much. If it causes a disruption in sales to post a one-star review, perhaps the author will bitch at the publisher about lost revenue. Amazon sold tons of Kindles with a false implied promise, which they were then unable to keep. So it’s ‘game on’ as far as I’m concerned.
Huh. In my (limited) experience (Just got a Kindle last week), the vast majority of e-books are cheaper than their hard copy counterparts. I don’t really read bestsellers, though, so that might be a different story.