Yeah, they want to piss off some customers.
No, of course not. It’s because they believe that some number of customers who want the e-book version now will be willing to pay more than people who want to buy the hardback or the paperback now. Later, things might change, and the relative prices might change.
I’m not sure how many times I have to repeat that there are virtually no cases in which the publisher’s prices are higher for the print versions than the e-versions.
There are cases in which a vendor will price the print copies lower. The publisher can’t control this, any more than a farmer can tell a supermarket not to price milk artificially low as a loss leader. (Except to not sell them any milk, a last ditch possibility that everybody hates.)
It’s not the publishers. It’s NOT the publishers. It’s not the PUBLISHERS.
Keep reading that until it sinks in.
Except that, in many cases, it’s the publishers who set the retail prices on e-books. I just now did some searching and found a good explanation of what’s going on with e-book pricing:
Why are eBooks often more expensive than paperback or hardcover books?
If I understand correctly, if you go to Amazon.com, the price you actually pay to order a hardcover or paperback copy of a book is decided by Amazon itself, while the price you pay for a Kindle edition is decided by the publisher. So if the e-book costs you more than the print edition, it’s not that someone decided it should be that way; it’s the combined result of two separate decisions by separate entities.
Yeah, if you want to be pedantic, the question becomes, “Why do the publishers forbid Amazon and other retailers from offering any discounts on e-books?”. It’s the same discussion from the consumer’s point of view.
Almost everything I’ve bought for my Kindle since I got it two months ago has been either free, or cheap, or an incredible deal (the complete Mark Twain for $2.49!). The few exceptions include items only available as e-books.
It is the publisher, it IS the publisher, it is the PUBLISHERS that are setting e-book prices on Amazon. Keep reading that until it sinks in. And read Thudlow’s link.
Thank you;
sinjin
eta: I don’t care what the publishers list price is for a print book, especially a hard cover. Any one in the US that pays the list price for a hard cover especially a bestseller is a fool.
Someone may have mentioned this already. Haven’t gotten through the entire thread. Amazon has a 30 day, no questions asked return policy on Kindles.
I’ll never give mine up. And I even buy best sellers at full price, sometimes, if they’re books that I care enough about reading but not enough about to buy paper copies. I used to carry a box of books in the trunk of my car. Now I carry a couple hundred books (many of them free or massively discounted) in one hand. If the publisher wants me to pay the same price for a book that I’d pay for paper, I just imagine that I’m paying for the right to read it more than a physical product. It’s all about how you rationalize it in your head.
So let me get this straight. If I want to read the e-version I have to first pay over a hundred dollars for a reader, then on top of that sometimes pay the same or more for the book that has no printing or materials cost? Yeah, pretty sure I’m going to stick with the dead tree editions until they’re giving out the readers for around the cost of a hardcover and the books for considerably less than the paperback. (And also make the readers smell. Books should smell! Giles said so!)
Well, no.
If you want to read the e-version, you could download the free Kindle app for the PC, phone, etc. that you already own, and just pay for the book.
Or, by contrast, you could pay over a hundred dollars for a reader, then spend the rest of your life reading free books from sources like Project Gutenberg.
The reader and the books—the hardware and the software—aren’t necessarily as linked as you imply.
Spending over a hundred dollars for a reader doesn’t somehow morally entitle you to cheap books. The authors and editors and publishers of those books don’t see any money from the sale of the devices.
Yes, no, and no.
I’m well aware of agency pricing; it was a huge kerfluffle in the writing community. And it does not change a word of what I’ve said. The list price of every (or virtually every) hardback and trade paperback is set by the publisher and is higher than the price that the publisher charges for the e-book.
Amazon sometimes decides to charge less for paper editions, which it can do because of the way the contracts are set up. That is NOT the publisher’s decision and is not in the hands of the publisher. Many other vendors choose to sell the same physical books for more money, having made the decision again entirely outside of any publisher’s knowledge or choice.
Publishers are tying to enforce some pricing standards for e-books. Whether you think that is the right course or not, it is utterly irrelevant to any of the statements any of you have made about publishers. None of you have shown publishers charging more for e-books to be true for a single publisher, a single title, or a single author.
Booksellers may at their discretion sell books a loss leaders. Most vendors have the discretion to sell most anything at a loss. (Even when brands enforce advertising restrictions on lower than MSRP amounts, sales below wholesale can and do ensue, though usually not on first appearance.)
E-books are mostly sold at below the wholesale cost of a hardback. They are now, today, currently, priced lower than print by publishers. It is not a pedantic point; it is utterly crucial to any understanding of why pricing is the way it is.
And to those who might doubt this, it’s not hard to do your own research. Check out the ebook prices on Amazon/B&N, then go to the publisher’s website and see what they are offering the hardback for.
Now, the place where I do see some odd price inversions is when a book gets released as a mass market paperback. In many cases I have noted that the ebook price stays where it was when the ebook format was competing only with the hardcover edition.
I do think that the publishers are missing a bet here. I often hesitate to buy an ebook in these circumstances. And there are enough good books out there that, unless I’m actually planning a trip to a bookstore soon, I’m more likely to buy a different book, possibly from a different publisher, as an ebook just for the instant gratification. And if I’m not seeking instant gratification, that price inversion is likely to drive me to put a hold on that title at my public library. After all, I’ve already waited for the book to come out in paperback. What’s a couple more months?
If I really want to read a book that has just come out, then I’ve already decided to pay the premium price, whether for hardcover or ebook. (And I never have bought many hardcover books, just because of the extra shelf space required.) But I do think that publishers would get a bigger share of my money if they ramped down the ebook price to paperback levels once the book was available in that format.
Just read the bolded points above and explain to me why it’s not the publisher’s fault that e-books can’t be discounted by the vendor but print books can. The publisher’s price is akin to the MSRP on a car. Virtually no one pays it. Your use of the publisher’s list price vs e-book actual price is disingenuous at best.
This does happen, which is why I was careful to qualify my statements. But it happens only in a few special cases. The James Patterson Fiction Factory had seven #1 bestsellers last year. He’s one of the few authors to be published in both trade paperback and mass-market paperback editions. Even so, you have to go to page 3 at Amazon before you even find a mass-market edition. And it takes even more searching to find an example that puts a mass-market paperback at $7.99 and the Kindle at $9.99.
So how many readers is Patterson losing by not allowing a Kindle discount? Virtually none. Bestsellers make their own rules and own economic structure.
They have. If not, show me the evidence that they haven’t. Not the discounted prices that vendors sell at for certain loss-leader titles, but publisher’s prices. Moreover the cost of the book is being amortized by the sales of the hardback edition. If that went away, e-books would cost more than they do today, not less. All the examples Thurlow Boink gave of lower prices are for category bestsellers. Amazon can afford to price some as loss leaders, while they’re bestsellers. They won’t a year from now. They don’t today for the Jonathan Franzen book that was lower yesterday.
You can scream as loud as you want that you’ll buy more books with lower prices. What you really need to do is tell me, as an author, that you’ll buy so many more of my books that the increased gross will make up for my decreased net per book. That is the only number that matters. Try to convince me of that and I’ll pay rapt attention.
That’s going to depend on who you are. As I’ve stated, there are some authors that I won’t even read if the book is free (a gift, or from the library). There are some who I’ll be happy to pay full hardback price for, and I’ll even pay for the luxury edition. For most authors that I read, though (and I’m VERY curious as to who you are), whether or not I’ll buy a book is determined by a number of factors…and one of those factors is price. I don’t know if I’ll buy enough additional books to make up for your decreased net or not. I do know that I buy copies of books to give away, and I generally buy nicer copies. I’ve bought no fewer than half a dozen Good Omens in hardback, at full price, as gifts, for instance. But I regard that as an exceptionally good book, worth the full price. In fact, I’d better go buy that as an ebook, because it’s a book that I keep wearing out from rereading, and a PB or ebook reader is much easier to carry around in my purse.
I’m using “you” and “me” generically.
Let’s put it in numbers. At $9.99 e-books are about already at cost. If you cut that in half, to $4.99, what has to happen? On average, every person in America has to double the number of books bought.
Is that a reasonable expectation? Even if you say that some people who buy zero books today will buy one or two, the average (mode) for book buyers, is it at all likely that the entire American book-buying public is buying only half of the books they would if the price were lower? Personally, I find that impossible to believe. Book reading is declining as an activity because of the range of other options for entertainment. But that’s what it would take just to keep the industry level. An industry that is failing and near-bankruptcy, and produces returns in the low single digits. To do better, the average American would have to triple book buying.
And that’s assuming that the people who are screaming about cheap books would consider $4.99 cheap. I doubt it. Little Nemo wanted $2.00 books. That means that every American book-buyer would have to increase the number bought five times just to return to even.
Those are impossible figures. The industry knows those are impossible figures. The industry can’t stay alive at those numbers. The generic you doesn’t care, but the generic you should care about authors, because authors can’t make a living with those numbers. That’s why I said earlier that such a future is bestsellers and hobbyists. It simply takes too long to write books. Minimum wage is around $15,000 a year. Let’s assume an inflated 20% royalty for an e-book. That’s a round dollar per $4.99 copy sold. The average book would have to sell 15,000 copies to get an author to minimum wage. The average (median) professionally-published book is 1-3,000 copies. If you double those numbers, you still fall far short. You need to assume that 5 times increase of book buying. To get authors up to minimum wage.
Books are not overpriced. They are wildly underpriced. That’s why publishers - and authors - are in a bind. They need to raise prices to keep the industry going. They can’t. They can’t lower prices and keep the industry going either. They’re the textile factories of culture. Except that we won’t import books written by cheap Chinese labor. Yet.
Argue those numbers. Don’t tell me what you would do, because you’re not representative. Tell me how to get the entire American public to buy 2,3,5 times as many books as today.
This is a confusing statement. What do you mean by “at cost”?
It’s certainly not the “unit cost”—the cost of producing another copy of an already-existing book.
If a seller sells something “at cost,” it generally means they’re offering it at a price equal to what they paid to have it available to sell. But that raises the question of what determined what their cost was, and why.
I suspect, from the rest of the post, that what you mean is that publishers just about break even when e-books are priced at $9.99, but I’m not sure. But this, in and of itself, doesn’t tell me anything about how the publishers’ revenue would be affected by a change in the price.
This fellow expresses how I feel to a T. on-ebook-pricing
I did not buy three e-books last week because the price was higher than the same vendor’s paperback price. If I had bought all three I would have gotten free shipping. However, I did not and do not plan to buy the paperback versions either. Others feel the same way. YMMV.
I would have to see some pretty convincing evidence to believe that ten bucks for the average ebook is about cost. VERY convincing indeed.
And publishers should, of course, be trying to persuade nonbook buyers to buy at least a few books, but I think that they should be far more interested in persuading book buyers, or book readers, to buy more books, whether ebooks or paper books. We’re already interested in reading (whether our own books or the library’s books), and we are usually in the habit of browsing book stores or the online websites.
I think that some books, priced at two bucks, are a great bargain. Others are wildly overpriced at that same price point. But if a book is in public domain…well, I don’t see why that book wouldn’t be priced at five bucks, or two bucks.
I DO want authors (that I enjoy) to be able to make a reasonable wage by writing. It’s in my own best interests if they do. I don’t know if most people see it this way.
The fact remains that publishers have to show readers that ten bucks is a reasonable price to pay for the average book that can’t be resold, or given away, and might get deleted. So far, I’m seeing that price as reasonable ONLY for books that don’t have any illustrations, and that I’d wear out if I keep rereading them. It’s like…there are a lot of things that I want, and I agree that the seller is asking a reasonable price for them. But I don’t see that I would get that much enjoyment for the item at that price, no matter how reasonable the price is. I’m a video game fan, I like swords, and this version of a particularly famous video game sword is reasonably priced. But I simply wouldn’t get more than about 20 bucks’ worth of enjoyment from the sword. Yes, I’m sure it costs much more than twenty bucks to make, and that this is a fair asking price. But if I don’t think that I’ll get that much enjoyment from an item, even if the price is reasonable, I’m not going to buy it. The publishers are going to have to either enhance the perceived value of books (and NOT by making them longer) or they’re gonna have to find yet another way to cut prices. I know that they’ve cut quality on at least some materials…
I don’t have a solution to enhanced revenue for publishers. All I’m saying is, as a person who usually spends a few hundred bucks on books per month, I’m not convinced that ebooks really cost about ten to twenty bucks to produce, and that they can’t be sold for less. I’m not saying that you’re a liar, I believe that you are telling the truth as you see it. But I’m also telling the truth when I say that I’m not seeing any benefit for me to buy ebooks at ten or twenty books, when a PB costs less and is less likely to be lost.
I am VERY wary that technology will move on. I have books from 40 years ago, that I bought new. I inherited even more books from my grandfather, which are even older. Some of them have been damaged over time, but most of them are still perfectly readable. On the other hand, I had a TI994/A and a Commodore 128 computer, and spent quite a lot of money on programs for them. Even if the computers were still usable, the cartridges and floppy disks have probably deteriorated so badly that they wouldn’t run. And THAT’S one of the biggest reasons why I’m not ditching my paper library.
From that link:
This. When Napster and Limewire were huge, it was the major record labels that were freaking out and trying to sue everyone because illegal downloads were hurting their bottom line. But their “bottom line” wasn’t some revenue figure decreed from on high on stone tablets. It’s what they thought they deserved to get in order to maintain their executive compensation and their stock prices. Consumers, obviously, had other ideas.
That said, I’m not familiar with the market for books and the number of people who own Kindles and iPads. I imagine that prices for ebooks will become more competitive once more people own those devices. But if they continue to charge more for ebooks than physical books, I think they’re going to have a tough time convincing consumers to invest in a Kindle.
I am particularly skeptical about the notion that producing another ecopy costs as much as printing another edition of a paper book, unless there’s some sort of limit on how many copies of ebooks can be sold in the original contract between publisher and writer. But really, how does selling another copy of an ebook increase the publisher’s fixed costs? That is, once the software’s in place, how much more does it cost to transfer a digital copy from the publisher or distributor to the reader?