Niche Prices for Electronic Books?

While it’s said that information wants to be free, that’s not how it works if you want it delivered in the form of a book. But how much should that book cost when it doesn’t need to be printed? Kindle users resist paying more than $9.99, reports the New York Times, while publishers want higher price levels. In fact Amazon is currently subsidizing the purchase price of new books so it can offer them through Kindle, paying publishers the same $13 it pays them for a new hardcover title with a list price of $26.

Publishers are caught between authors who want to be paid high advances and consumers who believe they should pay less for a digital edition, largely because the publishers save on printing and shipping costs. But publishers argue that those costs, which generally run about 12.5 percent of the average hardcover retail list price, do not entirely disappear with e-books. What’s more, the costs of writing, editing and marketing remain the same.

“The concept that because a book is an e-book it should automatically be priced significantly lower than a paper book is one we don’t agree with,” said Carolyn Reidy, chief executive of Simon & Schuster. “What a consumer is buying is the content, not necessarily the format.”

[Thanks to John Mansfield for the link.]

2 thoughts on “Niche Prices for Electronic Books?

  1. If what we’re really buying is “the content” – then why can’t I purchase the darned content ONCE and get it in as many different formats as I want, whenever I want, however many times I want?

    The music industry has been (trying to) teach us for years that what we’re buying isn’t “the content”, its the format. Same goes for movies.

    And yes, I understand that printing &c are a small percentage of the overall cost – but I thought we were in the digital era: marketing ought to be cheaper, proofing ought to be cheaper: in fact, about the only thing that isn’t really affected by digitization in the cost department is the creative aspect (and when it comes down to it, that’s only because we’re focusing on an intangible – not the physical aspects: writing now is a heck of a lot “easier” than it was with ink pot, quill and by candlelight).

    Publishing, per se, ought to be as simple as running the ms through spellcheck, running it through a formatter, sending out email blasts and a few review copies and moving on to the next title. What’s so hard and expensive about that?!? Apologies to folks working in the biz who know how simplistic a take that really is.

  2. “If what we’re really buying is “the content” – then why can’t I purchase the darned content ONCE and get it in as many different formats as I want, whenever I want, however many times I want?”

    One could argue that when you purchase a book you are purchasing the content in a single format.

    “Publishing, per se, ought to be as simple as running the ms through spellcheck, running it through a formatter, sending out email blasts and a few review copies and moving on to the next title.”

    Sadly not all writers deliver perfect manuscripts.

    Sadly spell check does not recognize the difference between “their” “they’re” “there”.

    Still gotta pay carbon based life forms to make things write, I mean wright, no … I mean right.

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