Dear e-book publishers: stop gouging us.
Look, I’m your biggest fan. I’ve been reading digitally distributed fiction and non-fiction since the early days of the PalmPilot.
The most frequently used apps on my iPhone, bar none, are Kindle, eReader, and Stanza.
But I’m getting increasingly frustrated with e-book prices, which rarely represent a savings over their print (aka dead-tree) counterparts.
My uncle’s art book
When my uncle’s art book was put up on Lulu, he made some conscious decisions. The price of the paperback was in keeping with the going rates seen at places like the Cleveland Museum of Art. The e-book version had a ten dollar surcharge attached to it. Unlike Amazon’s algorithmic pricing, he had a deliberate purpose in doing so. He wanted to make it available but only at a premium. He wanted to steer consumers toward the physical paper-based version as that is the best way to consume the work in his opinion.
See: http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-works-of-edward-m-kellatis-a-sampler/2056656
________________________
Stephen Michael Kellat, MSLS
PGP KeyID: DC5A625B
Research is *so* difficult
Broida really should and probably does know better. It doesn’t take a whole lot of looking to find out that the “print portion” of a book’s price (the cost of printing, binding, shipping/warehousing) is relatively trivial–no more than 1/7th of the price of a typical hardbound, probably no more than $2 for any but the shortest-run hardbounds, less than that for paperbacks.
(Note: I said “price,” not “cost”–the biggest single portion of price is the discount to the distributors & bookstores.)
I like StephenK’s example: pricing with a purpose.
Price on Amazon
That price seems very strange as if something was happening wrong. I just looked myself and it is only $9.95 on Amazon which is sort of the standard Kindle price for the average book.
I agree e-books cost much less to produce than print copies but price to sell is not only based on the cost of production. It is also based on what the market will support. Right now there must be enough buyers that prefer the advantages of an ebook and see the value the price difference of only a few bucks a bargain for the way they interact with books.
Brian C. Gray
http://blog.case.edu/bcg8
Price change
When the story first came out the price was $14. In the meantime the book has entered the top #100 selling books on Amazon. Amazon seems to have a policy of trying to make bestsellers for the Kindle sell for $9.99.
Even at a loss
Amazon does seem to have that policy–even when it means Amazon’s taking a loss on those items. (One “competitor,” CoolBooks, has stated as policy that they won’t price ebooks so as to take a loss–and, given relative size, probably can’t afford to do so. As a result, bestsellers are more expensive there. One could interpret Amazon’s pricing as predatory, intended to drive competitors out of business–but, you know, that would be 20th century thinking. Here in the 21st century, we apparently all believe that One Supplier is Best as long as it’s cheap. After all, monopolies always serve the needs of the citizenry. Right?)