Agree, wholeheartedly. I just got my Kindle a month ago and already have a year’s free reading on the thing.
Disagree. Reviews should be for content, not pricing. It’s unfair to the author and like you say, nobody gives a damn, so you’re wasting your time.
But Exapno – who has years of experience in publishing (do you?) – is correct. Or, rather, it might increase sales a bit, will decrease the amount of money paid for the book. No matter how much you lower costs, you still have to make a profit.
Here’s where you go wrong. The production cost of a paper book is only a small portion of the cost. According to O’Reilly (whose books are more expensive than many to produce), 17% of the cost of a book is the cost to print it. If the hardcover sells for $25, then the book could come down to $20.75. If it sells for $15 in a trade paperback, then the cost would be $12.75. Any reduction greater than 17% starts cutting into other expenses.
Will a 17% cut gain 17% in sales? There’s no evidence it will. And the cuts being advocated are usually far greater than 17%.
And many of the expenses on that chart can’t be cut. If it costs you $10 to publish the book and you sell it for $8, all the sales in the world won’t make a profit for you.
Obviously, the numbers prove the first statement wrong. And there’s no way to be sure if the cut in price will increase sales enough to offset the loss of revenue per book.
LOL! From years of experience, plus a knowledge of how the things work in the real world, the author’s royalty is first thing the publisher will cut. Ultimately, the author will make far less money.
True, until the publishers go out of business and he has to deal with nothing but vanity press and self-published books.
Ultimately, everyone.
So you want the publishers to cut their own throats to sell things at a major loss? What good does that do to the reader?
You’re missing the point. The actual question is “does lowering prices increase sales sufficiently for net profits to make up for the loss in gross sales?” The best evidence to date is that it does for a small number of people and doesn’t for the large majority of people. Remaindered books are not equivalents, because the author gets nothing from the sale of these books. Many books are never remaindered in the first place; they are simply pulped.
And e-books are universally lower than the cost of hardback books right now. They are almost universally lower than the cost of trade paperbacks, with only a tiny handful of exceptions. They are almost universally lower than the cost of mass-market paperbacks, again with only a few exceptions. They may or may not be lower than the cost of used books, but those are not comparable, since neither the publisher nor author gets any share of that money.
However, as Chuck already said, real publishers have a variety of costs other than those that paper entails. Publisher still need to pay editors, art directors, copyeditors, proofreaders, artists, marketing departments, royalty departments, lawyers, and probably a half dozen fields I’m forgetting. People are the largest slice of the publishing pie. This does not go away with format. Putting books into the multitude of electronic formats may actually increase some costs in the short term until more standards arise. In today’s world, e-books piggyback on the sunk costs of producing the print books, but they are less than 10% of the whole. Maybe in some future where they are 90% of the whole we’ll be able to see what the true costs of e-books are but today we simply have no idea.
Where is that magical two dollar book going to come from?
They already do.
No you’re not typical. Those of us in this thread are all probably atypical. I buy hundreds of cheap books every year, and a smaller number of new books. Even that smaller number is way above the average that bookbuyers purchase. Which, as I said, is one or two a year. Romance buyers typically buy more books than any other genre, which is why romance is now over all of all mass-market paperback sales. But that has very little to do with the overall book market and the market for hardback books. There is no reason to believe, from any past experience, that genre paperbacks should have the same pricing, marketing or cost structures that mainstream hardbacks should.
The Romance Writers of America has nearly 10,000 members. Only about 2,000 have sold professionally. The rest want to write but couldn’t sell. Now they can publish e-books. What is the proper price for those books? How many are they going to sell? How does this affect the books from professional publishers? Do you believe that the market for romance novels can increase so that more books are sold at all levels?
The Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators has a similar ratio of wannabes to professionals, and twice as many members, but there is no good market for illustrated e-books and none at all for books for babies to play with. How should they handle this market?
Th publishing world is like a solar system. There are a few giant planets, a few lesser ones, thousands of middling asteroids, and millions of tiny rocks. It’s hard to make any general statements that apply to all of them. But “if you just lower the price everybody makes more money” is guaranteed not to be one of them. There simply aren’t enough book buyers in America to make this work. And there is no reason to think that book buying will grow in the future as those who have grown up with print die off. I’ve heard from huge numbers of people older than I am that they’ll never buy e-books. I’m a diehard print man myself, even though I own a Kindle. But I don’t hear from teenagers that they’re going to double the number of books they buy in the future when everything is electronic. Authors want to make money for what is typically a year’s worth of work. Selling 100 copies at $2.99 won’t cut it.
Yeah, but I’m disgruntled. Perhaps when I’m more gruntled, or have a better avenue of redress, I’ll change.
I just look for bargains – and there are lots of bargains in the Kindle store. And there are so many books out there waiting for me to read them that I don’t need to overpay.
Supply and demand – if enough readers eschew the overpriced new releases, they won’t stay overpriced for long. I’ve never needed one particular book so badly that I couldn’t wait for the price to drop.
The appropriate avenue of redress when you don’t want to pay the demanded price is simply not to buy the book. (It goes without saying that it doesn’t mean not buying the book but then acquiring an unauthorized copy.) That’s how the marketplace works. If the price is too high, you forego the goods.
I don’t think so. At least not if by “cost” you mean what I, a consumer, would actually pay for a copy, as opposed to the non-discounted price stamped on the cover.
As an exercise, I went to Amazon.com and looked at their Top 10 Customer Favorite books of 2010, in hopes that that would give me a representative sample of recent, popular books, and compared the price of a printed edition with the price of a Kindle edition. Here’s what I found:
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest: Hardcover: $11.89. Kindle edition: $11.99.
Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything: Available in paperback for $8.25. Kindle edition $9.99.
Mockingjay (The Final Book of The Hunger Games): Hardcover: $7.98, Kindle edition $7.14.
Dead in the Family (Sookie Stackhouse, Book 10): Available in paperback for $7.99, Kindle edition $7.99.
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday MachineAvailable in paperback for $9.57, Kindle edition $7.75.
Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime: Available in paperback for $9.43, Kindle edition $9.99.
The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner: An Eclipse Novella (Twilight Saga): Hardcover $8.18, Kindle edition $9.99.
Freedom: A Novel: Hardcover $14.93, Kindle edition $14.99.
Sh*t My Dad Says: Hardcover $8.97, Kindle edition $9.99.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Available in paperback for $8.24, Kindle edition $9.99.
In each case the printed edition I mentioned is what you can order directly from Amazon. In some cases, other sellers are offering even lower prices on new and used editions. So no, it doesn’t look to me like e-books are anywhere near “universally” lower.
This is true for the publisher on the pricing side, but it’s not always true on the consumer side. I’m sure the publishers hate the whole “loss leader” model, but at least twice over the last year, I have been looking at a new release on Amazon, and have seen that I could pre-order the Hardcover edition for ~14.25 or the Kindle edition for 14.99. Hardcovers at between 40 and 50 percent off is not new, it’s not rare, and it’s how everyone that I know thinks of them as priced when they’re considering buying them.
That said, I don’t really care all that much on new releases. I think $12 for something just released in hardcover and $5 for something just released in mass market paperback “feels” right, but I’m not a marketing department, I don’t have access to all of that data, and I’m certainly willing to entertain the chance that I’m wrong.
What kills me is all of the old stuff. I’m one of those people who likes re-reading books. I would love to grab a few dozen of my favorites so that I can carry them all around in one place. We’re largely talking SF and fantasy released anywhere from 10 to 40 years ago. On the one hand, books popular enough to have been republished within the last decade, and which have been converted to Kindle format; on the other hand, books that have been popular enough and out long enough that they have lines like “Used from: .01” on their Amazon pages. If these books were $2 or $3 a pop, I would probably spend $100 on books tomorrow. I’ve done that exact thing during Steam sales, either with games I already own, or with games that sound like I might want to possibly play them some day. I’ve done that exact thing with random self-published authors: if the first book of your series is $1.99 or less and it has a few positive reviews, well, where’s that Purchase with 1-Click button? I’m just not going to spend $5.99 on Ender’s Game, $7.99 on Neuromancer, or $9.99 on The Hobbit (I know there’s the movie, but SERIOUSLY?!), all books I would love to have on my Kindle.
I’m sure I’m also atypical in my buying patterns, but there’s something very real to be said about “impulse buy” price points. I am the kind of person that the book industry should be trying to get money from, since I’m certainly willing to give it to them; instead, I am considering whether it’s worth it to put together an automated setup to PDF the books I already own.
I will buy new books of a few authors, and most other authors I will buy used With some authors, I’ll buy only the books that are on the clearance racks. There are some I won’t read at all, even if the book is free.
So, for some authors I’ll pay $15-30 per book, others about $5-10, and still others only one or two bucks. But if I pay the new book prices, I DO expect to get something physical, and preferably with maybe something extra. Example: I’ve bought several Order of the Stick comics, and most of that content is online for free. But I bought the books because I enjoy reading a hardcopy much more than I do online (or, if they were available for my Nook, on an ereader). How many books I’ll buy new depends on how many books are available that I want in that format. I’m not going to buy a John Grisham or Steven King book new, either in hardback or paperback. I’ve bought several John Scalzi books in new hardback…after I picked up a USED paperback of his and read it and enjoyed it. But I definitely sort books into price points, and it seems to me that the price points of many of the ebooks available is too high for what they offer. Maybe they can’t make money if they offer the books for less. But I will spend more money on books only if I feel that I get my money’s worth from them. For instance, I recently paid a dollar for a Steven King book…and that’s about as much entertainment as it gave me. I read it once, I’m not going to reread it. On the other hand, I’m rereading a Scalzi book that I paid around twenty bucks for. I think I got a bargain.
I make my decision on whether to buy a book or not based on how much I think that I’ll enjoy it, for the cost of the book. I vastly prefer regular paperbacks, not because they’re cheaper, but because I hate trade pbs and hardbacks for the size. I also think that dust jackets should go the way of the dodo. Now, comics/graphic novels do have a justification for their size, in which case I’m willing to put up with them. But yes, my demand for books is HIGHLY elastic, based on their authors and price. I can find plenty of stuff to read that won’t cost me anything. And publishers should take readers like me into account, and they should pay more attention to me and people like me, because I buy more books every two weeks than most people will buy in a year. I should count as two dozen regular book buyers.
But of course I mean the non-discounted price stamped on the cover. How could you talk about anything if you had to go by whatever sale a particular outlet had at any instant? Amazon’s prices are not publishers’ prices. They change from day-to-day as well. But Amazon’s pricing doesn’t effect the wholesale price it pays to the publisher, from which the publisher calculates its profit, or the list price from which the author calculates the royalties he or she gets paid. And that’s true whatever format the book is sold in.
I have been a bit disappointed lately in the price of kindle books. The one thing that makes me absolutely NOT buy a kindle book is if the price of the e-book is greater than the price of the paperback. This is a deal breaker for me. And lately it’s happened more and more. I have no idea what publishers are thinking.
Another deal breaker for me is not offering the e-book at the same time the hard-cover comes out, I’m looking at you Stephen King. E-book readers aren’t good enough for you, you’re not good enough for me to wait on.
As a heads up to you all. Many great books can be downloaded in Kindle format at Project Gutenberg (PG). Just yesterday I sampled a book on sale at amazon and noticed that the formatting was identical to that used by Distributed Proofreaders (DP), where I have volunteered on and off for the past several years. DP produces many of the books listed on PG. So I went to PG and sure enough the book, or the stories in the collection were all available for free at PG. Don’t pay for what you can get for free!!
I, too, refuse to buy books for my Kindle when they are more expensive than the paperback version. I like eBooks, but if I’m going to pay so much money, I want to actually own the book, not just pay a fee to rent it indefinitely (or until Amazon decides to take it away, or their servers fail, or …). Expecting consumers to pay more for less product is baffling.
Can I ask why audiobooks are double or triple the price of actual books?
Audiobooks are more expensive because they do have to pay someone, or several someones, to read the book aloud. Or at least that’s my understanding.
Yeah, when you buy an audiobook, you’re paying for the work of the author (and editors, etc.), the same as if you bought the printed book. Plus on top of that, you’re paying for the work of the narrator (and sound engineers, etc.) who turned it into an audiobook.
At least, that’s one way to look at it. There are probably other factors, like what the respective markets will bear.
This strikes me as a bit self-deluding. These sales are not particularly unpredictable. B&M stores have been doing them for bestsellers for 20 years, Amazon, bn.com, and other internet sites have been doing them on almost all hardcovers for 5-10. They are the reality of what the consumer pays. To pick a book currently in the Top 10/New Releases section, how many consumers are paying 27.95 for the new Sookie Stackhouse novel (not a series I read, but something popular enough that I’ve heard of it, and on the various top 10 lists right now so easy to compare)? 10%? 5%? 2%? I would be utterly shocked if it was in the double digits. I would wager that the majority of the people buying that book are paying something between 14.70, which is what Amazon currently has it listed at, and 16.77, which is 40% off the cover price, and what I could get it for by driving down to my local B&N or Borders (assuming my local Borders hasn’t gone out of business). If you are trying to look at the effects of pricing and consumer demand on ebooks, those are the numbers that you have to be comparing the 14.99 ebook price to. 27.95 hasn’t been a reality on the consumer side for a decade, now.
Personally, I prefer e-books. I’d be happy to pay a little more for them. As someone who works and has kids, I can manage a trip to a bookstore at most once a week. The library is open much shorter hours - thanks, budget cuts - so it’s hard to get there more than once a month. With e-books, I get instant gratification. Other bonuses: I can read in bed without the light on (really more of a plus for Mr.Q), and I can read wherever is convenient (on the train, in line at the grocery store, doctor’s waiting room) without carrying a book around with me. Perhaps the biggest bonus, though, is that I don’t have to find anywhere to put the damn thing when I’m done with it. We have an entire freaking basement full of books. I don’t need any more.
To sum up, no whining about kindle ebook pricing from over here. Of course, I read on my iphone, so I didn’t buy the kindle to start with.
So. Are e-books worth more than paper or less than paper? Why? To which portions of the consumer base? To which proportions of the consumer base? How much more or less? Is this true for all books or a certain segment of them? If a segment, which segment(s) and why and when and how much?
As soon as you settle these questions, let the publishers know.
I have no problem paying for a book I want if the price is what I am willing to pay, much like everything else I buy. I prefer not having the physical book, actually, I would love to be able to have every physical book I currently have converted into eBooks. For me the Kindle isn’t about getting books cheaper (which can be nice, when it happens) but the convenience of being able to have all my books in one place, easily accessible. I prefer reading on the Kindle than a physical book because they can be quite combersome and heavy if you get a hefty hardcover tome.
Lately there have been some interesting posts, relevant to the kinds of issues being discussed here, in the Kindle Review blog. Excerpts:
From It is a reading revolution, and there will be blood
From People’s champions vs Publishers’ champions
From Return on Investment when you Buy and Read a Book
From It’s a tough world for authors
I don’t necessarily agree with everything being said in these posts, but they provide an interesting perpective. I do think that publishers aren’t currently very good at seeing things from the readers’ point of view (and I take Exapno’s Post #30 as evidence of this). And I strongly suspect that the book industry and its ways of pricing, distribution, etc. may change dramatically in the not-too-distant future. We have not reached an equilibrium point.