So I'm fairly new to ebooks and ereaders in general. Lulled into complacency by the low prices of Kindle book prices, I jumped right into the whole scene with a Cybook Gen3, and I'm now completely taken aback by the prices on books anywhere approaching new.

Since I'm primarily a SF reader, my early purchases were a lot of sci-fi classics by the masters; Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, and their contemporaries. These were cheap titles, and I thought the future looked rosy for ebooks. Now that I've started to look for some more recent titles, I'm completely floored that I'm seeing prices of $20+. Double-u, Tee, Eff?!? I can understand if it's a brand new book just out in hardcover, but hardcovers that have been out a year, or even books now in paperback go for the same damn price?!?

The first book I was looking for was Spook Country by Gibson. $20 at most sites. The book is out in bloody paperback for $10, and you can still get the damn hardcover for $12! You know, physical books that they had to destroy trees to make and get a whole manufacturing and shipping process to get in peoples hands. And I have to pay almost double for a manuscript file that was run through an ebook creator program? What is going on here?

I've read several threads where people have said that the ebook retailers drag their feet when it comes to updating prices for current books, but the problem seems more endemic than that. Do companies like BooksonBoard, Fictionwise, or Mobipocket respond to questions/requests for lower prices on books where the physical editions are already far cheaper than the digital versions?

Well, if you like SF then www.baen.com is always good. They have a lot of free ebooks and AFAIK all new books are $5. Or you could just buy a webscription and get 5 Books for $15.

Thanks for the tip! With the prices the way they are, I'll be on the lookout for deals like never before.

prices are definitely one of the biggest obstacles to more widespread acceptance of ebooks. like you, i can't justify paying full hardcover price for an ebook (not even when it's new ! sorry), and this sometimes prevents me from buying a book, which i will try to get at the library instead.

the ebook industry is still in its infancy, and i think it's important for us, as consumers, to participate in the form it will take. we can do this by trying to make our voices heard to the publishers ; i have written to a couple of publishers to ask them about their intentions of making digital editions of their books available, and also to let them know that i won't buy overpriced books. a lot of people talk about voting with your pocketbook, and refusing to buy books with drm at outrageous prices ; i think this is a good idea too, but it's best to do so while also letting the publishers know *why* you are not buying their books, so they don't interpret the lack of sales as a lack of interest.

in this thread (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=22743) we discussed penguin's prices and a few of us wrote to them (you'll find the contact info in the thread, if you would like to do the same :wink:) ; we got back identical noncommittal replies, but i think it's a valid effort nonetheless and the more people write to them the better ; hopefully they will eventually be forced to listen.

i would encourage you to send an email to the publisher whenever you see an ebook priced the same as a new hardcover, *especially* if the hardcover is already available for less. in this specific case, i've heard that some booksellers are quite responsive, and will mark down the books if you alert them, so you should also write to Fictionwise or Books on Board or wherever you are shopping for ebooks.

Now that I've started to look for some more recent titles, I'm completely floored that I'm seeing prices of $20+. Double-u, Tee, Eff?!? I can understand if it's a brand new book just out in hardcover, but hardcovers that have been out a year, or even books now in paperback go for the same damn price?!?

It's all about internal publishing industry politics.

1. All the major publishing imprints are divisions of large multinational media conglomerates these days. For example: if Ace or Roc go bankrupt, don't expect to read about it in the Financial Times -- they're units of Penguin Group, which in turn is part of Penguin-Putnam, who happen to also publish the FT.

2. The execs in charge of the publishing units are, like execs in any other multinational, expected to contribute to the corporate bottom line -- or else.

3. The structure of these publishing units is geared around a production pipeline that takes in manuscripts at one end and ships provisions to a warehouse for distribution via retail outlets at the other, typically processing several books per week. This process is reflected in the rights contracts that their legal departments negotiate with the authors. It is very hard to change this structure because it's How The Industry Works. (Which is inviolable, because the publishing industry works the way it does because its practices are the vector sum of all practices that have not caused some other publisher to go bankrupt at some previous point in the past two hundred years. In other words, it doesn't make sense to look at what it does, you need to understand it by looking at what it doesn't do.)

4. Consequently, ebooks are generated by the same production process as dead tree books, and are "shipped" to an imaginary "warehouse" from which copies are distributed to imaginary "wholesalers" like, say, Fictionwise.

4a. It is worth noting at this point that the cost of paper-and-ink contributes maybe 10% of the cover price of a novel. Another 10% goes to the author (plus or minus), about 10% goes to the publisher in profits, and 70% is gobbled up by the wholesale and retail supply chain.

5. This means that there's little or no flexibility in the process, and the publishers can't easily cut their overheads by redesigning the publishing pipeline to work sensibly.

6. They recognize that they could boost ebook sales by cutting the prices. But if they did that, they'd risk cannibalizing the sales of their dead-tree editions, and reducing their profitability. Their hands are tied so they can't streamline their processes to make a bigger profit on the ebooks; if they cut the ebook prices by even 10% below the dead-tree prices, they're eating into their profits. And that brings us round to point #2 above.

7. Moreover, ebook sales of DRM'd high-cover items are so piss-poor -- figures in double digits are not uncommon, compared to the four to five digit sales expected of a hardcover -- that there's no pay off in sight to act as an incentive for executive risk-taking (like, oh, selling ebooks for what everyone understands is a realistic price).

Finally,

8. You try selling a novel to a major publisher without giving them the ebook rights! I've tried it, and my agent just gets knocked back -- withholding ebook rights is a deal-breaker, because despite all of the above nonsense, everyone knows that ebook rights are going to be worth something sooner or later. So they insist on buying them, even though they can't use them effectively. And at the end of the day, we writers have to earn a living so we can eat and excrete more of the product, so we knuckle under.

prices are definitely one of the biggest obstacles to more widespread acceptance of ebooks. like you, i can't justify paying full hardcover price for an ebook (not even when it's new ! sorry), and this sometimes prevents me from buying a book, which i will try to get at the library instead.

the ebook industry is still in its infancy, and i think it's important for us, as consumers, to participate in the form it will take.

Zelda, you are absolutely right.

Right now ebook publishers are trying to make a fast buck with unnecessarily high prices. In fact, in a previous thread, someone (I expect he was from the ebook industry) argued that we had to pay more because of the convenience of buying ebooks versus driving to a bookstore to buy a pbook. IOW, his argument was similar to the justification for the odious 'Convenience charge' some cinemas and sports venues add to the bill; when, in reality, they are charging you for saving them money!

The truth is, the prices will ultimately be driven by supply and demand. But the ebook industry, like most, wants the answer to be low demand and high prices. The recording industry was like this over esongs till Steve Jobs grabbed them by the ears made them realize that selling to at a low cost would drive up demand and, since the price is so low, help reduce pirated songs.

Lots of other factors involved but that's a major one.

Zelda, you are absolutely right.

...The recording industry was like this over esongs till Steve Jobs grabbed them by the ears made them realize that selling to at a low cost would drive up demand and, since the price is so low, help reduce pirated songs.

Lots of other factors involved but that's a major one.

I wonder if Amazon will ever release the number of ebook/mag downloads... like Apple did after they passed the millionth iTunes downloads (then the billionth, etc,). Perhaps then we'll have something to point to when addressing publishers, "See, THEY made all this money on cheap downloads, now YOU do the same!"

Sigh, I love it when they kill a market (or induce rampant pirating) in the misguided attempt to make ever more money.

5. This means that there's little or no flexibility in the process, and the publishers can't easily cut their overheads by redesigning the publishing pipeline to work sensibly.


I disagree with the above. Publishers could easily sell directly via the web. Yes, it would cost some overhead up front to set this up. Even if they don't sell direct there needs to be no wholesale. A web service could be set up to provide e-book files directly to retailers cutting out all the warehousing and distribution costs. Surly with the price of gas these days printing and distributing pbooks is much more expensive than it was even 3 years ago.


6. They recognize that they could boost ebook sales by cutting the prices. But if they did that, they'd risk cannibalizing the sales of their dead-tree editions, and reducing their profitability. Their hands are tied so they can't streamline their processes to make a bigger profit on the ebooks; if they cut the ebook prices by even 10% below the dead-tree prices, they're eating into their profits. And that brings us round to point #2 above.


This is in no way true. Selling ebooks for less money can still bring more profit per unit even with lower retail prices.


7. Moreover, ebook sales of DRM'd high-cover items are so piss-poor -- figures in double digits are not uncommon, compared to the four to five digit sales expected of a hardcover -- that there's no pay off in sight to act as an incentive for executive risk-taking (like, oh, selling ebooks for what everyone understands is a realistic price).


Well, duh! This is because people are of the opinion that a DRMed ebook should not be the same price as a pbook. With a pbook I can read the book anywhere, resell it used, give it away, whatever. With a DRMed ebook I can read it on one device and thats it. Why should I pay the same price for this one use ebook that I would pay for a pbook?

BOb

It's fair to point out that if you go to a site like Fictionwise, you'll find many, many thousands of books at the US$5.99 price point, which seems enimently fair to me.

The average paperback book cost around £7-8 (say US$15) in the UK, so paying even $10 for an eBook is a considerable saving over paying a paperback here.

It's fair to point out that if you go to a site like Fictionwise, you'll find many, many thousands of books at the US$5.99 price point, which seems enimently fair to me.

The average paperback book cost around £7-8 (say US$15) in the UK, so paying even $10 for an eBook is a considerable saving over paying a paperback here.

Apples and Oranges, or in that case, different markets and currencies. Last I checked, MMPBs are around USD 6-10, which means an e-book at USD 6 isn't so much a considerable savings as it is simply a fair price at the lower end of the spectrum.

I disagree with the above. Publishers could easily sell directly via the web.

No, they couldn't, at least not easily, as Mr Stross points out in his analysis. See specifically points 1 through 4.

This is in no way true.

Is too. :-P

Seriously, accusing Mr Stross of being either an idiot or a liar strikes me as... disingenuous. His point, as I understand it, is that the publishing industry is fucked up. It also has very good historical reasons to be as fucked up as it is, which means its hard or nearly impossible to un-fuck. A couple thousand e-book fanatics writing enraged campaign letters aren't going to do the trick, I'm afraid. Amazon making serious bling with Kindle e-book sales, or Baen Books raking in enough money to make Croesus green with envy just might, but I don't think we are quite there, yet.

Apples and Oranges, or in that case, different markets and currencies. Last I checked, MMPBs are around USD 6-10, which means an e-book at USD 6 isn't so much a considerable savings as it is simply a fair price at the lower end of the spectrum.


Be that as it may, with the current low value of the US$, for those of us in Europe, eBook stores which price their books in US$ offer extremely competitive prices.

Be that as it may, with the current low value of the US$, for those of us in Europe, eBook stores which price their books in US$ offer extremely competitive prices.

And you can buy the American editions of paperback books in some shops and they are usually much cheaper so you should compare the price for these books.

Bookshops in the UK tend to merely replace the "$" with a "£" when it comes to setting prices :).

Bookshops in the UK tend to merely replace the "$" with a "£" when it comes to setting prices :).

I seem to remember that for example Murder One did not do that. But you have to look for these few book shops that imports American editions.

In the Science Fiction Bookshop in Stockholm and American mass market paperback is 7-8 Euro and en UK edition is 10-11 Euro.

Bookshops in the UK tend to merely replace the "$" with a "£" when it comes to setting prices :).

I recently bought the 5 volumes of Kasparov's 'Great Predecessors' chess books.

It was cheaper to buy them from Amazon (US) than from Amazon (UK) - even with the cost of international shipping :(.

(I did wonder if they'd just ship them from their UK warehouse as it would have saved them some expense - but they didn't.)

That's been my experience too, Sparrow. Books do seem to be significantly cheaper in the US than here.

I disagree with the above. Publishers could easily sell directly via the web.

That is indeed what Baen have done, via Webscription.

Here's the problem: Baen is an eight or nine person company, privately owned (although a 30% stake is owned by Tor), and Jim ruled his private company with a whim of iron. If he said "frog", people hopped.

If there was a large publisher than ran on the same basis and had an enlightened despot at the top who was willing to gamble a million or two on setting up a webscription work-alike, then yes, it could be made to work.

The trouble is, there's no in-house track record for selling large numbers of ebooks at these places; everybody "knows" that ebooks Don't Sell, so there's no point throwing good money away trying to fix the problem. (If you've ever worked in a large company, they all run internally on the rule "not invented here" -- it's a big up-hill battle to get them to acknowledge external reality.)

If you try to get a big publishing conglomerate to set up its own ebook direct sales arm and sell straight to the public, you will run into internal opposition from Legal ("but what about our contracts?!?"), from Marketing ("we don't know how to sell things this way!"), from Sales ("this is going to put us out of a job if it works -- how do we deal with it?"), from Production ("you want us to do *what*?") and so on, all the way down the line. The only people who don't have an axe to grind are Editorial (which is good), but everyone else is so invested in the current publishing model that they expect to lose out -- either to lose money on a doomed experiment, or by being out of a job (if their job is contingent on keeping the existing supply chain in being).

Let me add: I'm both an author and an ebook consumer and a Linux gearhead. I want to see cheap, DRM-free ebooks available easily on every platform in non-proprietary formats. I want to see authors able to earn a living and publishers able to stay in business. I want a chicken in every pot. Alas, the publishing industry is broken, and it is broken for good historical reasons. Un-breaking it will be very hard, and will inevitably put a lot of people out of work (mostly in the wholesale warehouses and supply chain). Given that nobody wants to be put out of work due to massive rationalization and downsizing in the industry they're part of, they're going to fight back.

So it's going to be messy, if it happens at all.

I'm afraid the answer is going to be Darwinian. 1.) Baen books make a solid profit off of e-books. 2.) All the other big publishers don't (won't) sell e-books competitively, and so give up their potentional e-book sales. So... 3.) Over time, authors will start moving over to Baen books (and other enlighted competitors), to grab the extra money.

Currently, Baen maintains a very narrow editorial focus, even inside of S/F. Even so, they seem to be (slowly) broadening their focus, which is going to be eventually good for both authors and readers.

Last I checked, MMPBs are around USD 6-10, which means an e-book at USD 6 isn't so much a considerable savings as it is simply a fair price at the lower end of the spectrum.


When sir is the last time you went to a book store? Most MMPBs that I see at your typical Barnes & Nobel are $9+, most around $12-$15. The NYT best sellers are usually discounted 25% of their list price... but not everyone only buys NYT best sellers.

BOb

When sir is the last time you went to a book store? Most MMPBs that I see at your typical Barnes & Nobel are $9+, most around $12-$15. The NYT best sellers are usually discounted 25% of their list price... but not everyone only buys NYT best sellers.

BOb

Hunh?!?

Was just at my local (Citrus Heights, CA) B&N and picked up five SF and Thriller MMPBs. Not a one of these *NEW RELEASES* were over $7.99. Two were $6.99. You might want to check out just how the store is 'rigging' the prices where you're at.

Derek

If you try to get a big publishing conglomerate to set up its own ebook direct sales arm and sell straight to the public, you will run into internal opposition from Legal ("but what about our contracts?!?"), from Marketing ("we don't know how to sell things this way!"), from Sales ("this is going to put us out of a job if it works -- how do we deal with it?"), from Production ("you want us to do *what*?") and so on, all the way down the line.

Those are people problems, not technical issues. If there was an edit to do it, it would be done.

The technical aspect is certainly simple. Most anyone with some sense could set up an eCommerce web site within a week using off the shelf software and services.

As a developer I could set up a custom eCommerce site in less than a month leverage alot of off the shelf (open source) stuff.

So, maybe I should restate, a publisher setting up to sell eBooks directly to the end consumer would be simple... but not easy.

My point it, it is certainly doable.

BOb

It's fair to point out that if you go to a site like Fictionwise, you'll find many, many thousands of books at the US$5.99 price point, which seems enimently fair to me.

The average paperback book cost around £7-8 (say US$15) in the UK, so paying even $10 for an eBook is a considerable saving over paying a paperback here.

Well, it's not particularly fair when there is no consistency in book prices. When you go to a physical store to by say a fiction paperback, you're expecting virtually all of them to be roughly in the same price bracket, and they are. You don't go there expecting some paperbacks to be $7 to 10$, and then others to be $20 when there's no discernible reason for them to be that expensive.

This is exactly the situation with ebooks. You get a lot of titles cheaply, which is great, but there are still a hell of a lot, mostly new stuff, that costs much more than a paperback, and often times such as my example with Spook Country, more than the hardcover. They can have a million titles for $5, but if the particular books you're looking for are artificially expensive for no real reason, then it doesn't matter about their overall selection.

I know we're still in the infancy of this new form of literature, but it still smacks of laziness and greed on a grand scale.

Well, I'm quite impresssed by the number of books you can buy for the Kindle, less impressed that it is a closed system. I think that Amazon/Kindle may do for books what Itunes/Ipod did for music and hope it will turn into an open system, so I, as Cybook owner (got it today), can also shop for ebooks at Amazon.

I'd love that to. Hell, I probably would have bought a Kindle had that been an option for Canadians right now. Considering Sony only just recently got their reader up here, I doubt Amazon has an international release in the cards considering their supply problems just in the US.

T

My point it, it is certainly doable.

BOb

Videophones are doable too

Those are people problems, not technical issues. If there was an edit to do it, it would be done.
...

So, maybe I should restate, a publisher setting up to sell eBooks directly to the end consumer would be simple... but not easy.

My point it, it is certainly doable.
BOb

Well yes: indeed, I've got all the facilities and resources I need to do it myself, if it made sense to do so. (Got a colo server: check. Got a web platform that has been fire-tested through regular slashdotting/boingboing-ing: check. Married to a typesetter with an Adobe DTP workstation: check. Can hack perl: check. Got a Paypal merchant account: check.)

I think, however, that you underestimate the people problems.

And you overestimate the profitability of ebooks, too. Bluntly: yes, Baen have managed to make money at it. But it's nothing spectacular -- their ebook sales volumes are comparable to their hardcover sales volumes, and an order of magnitude below their mass market paperback sales. This is excellent going compared to the rest of the publishers (who in many cases sell so few DRMd/overpriced books that they don't even recoup the cost of paying someone at their typesetting bureau to hit the "Publish" button in Mobipocket Creator), but it's not setting the publishing world on fire. And, more importantly, it's not profitable enough to goad the execs in the big publishing houses to risk their jobs by going contra the received wisdom.

This will change over time (indeed, I believe Tor is making progress in this direction, but not yet publicly). But it's going to take years, not months. Because? As I said earlier: the practices of the publishing industry have evolved, and they're the vector sum of those practices that didn't make some other publisher go bust at some point in the past two centuries. And what you're asking for goes against some of those survival-honed best practices.

It's all about internal publishing industry politics.

SNIP points 1-5, all of which are very sensible

6. They recognize that they could boost ebook sales by cutting the prices. But if they did that, they'd risk cannibalizing the sales of their dead-tree editions, and reducing their profitability. Their hands are tied so they can't streamline their processes to make a bigger profit on the ebooks; if they cut the ebook prices by even 10% below the dead-tree prices, they're eating into their profits. And that brings us round to point #2 above.

Of course they could give it a try, but the (perceived) risk is a killer. Never mind the actual hard data from Baen... They don't appear to be able to assimilate actual data.

7. Moreover, ebook sales of DRM'd high-cover items are so piss-poor -- figures in double digits are not uncommon, compared to the four to five digit sales expected of a hardcover -- that there's no pay off in sight to act as an incentive for executive risk-taking (like, oh, selling ebooks for what everyone understands is a realistic price).

Finally,

8. You try selling a novel to a major publisher without giving them the ebook rights! I've tried it, and my agent just gets knocked back -- withholding ebook rights is a deal-breaker, because despite all of the above nonsense, everyone knows that ebook rights are going to be worth something sooner or later. So they insist on buying them, even though they can't use them effectively. And at the end of the day, we writers have to earn a living so we can eat and excrete more of the product, so we knuckle under.
Have you considered trying to sell them non-exclusive eRights? That would at least let you sell the ebook somewhere else, too. Alternatively, have you considered selling to Baen, who at least get it?

Xenophon

You all make such valid points,I hesitate to think I have something (worthwhile) to add to the discussion. I am in agreement with Zelda... I vote with my pocketbook pretty much everywhere now days, and while my reading addiction was/is probably the last to fall... it Is falling.
I hadn't actually thought about the fact that my unwillingness to pay what I might consider to be outlandish prices for an e-book could be interpreted as disinterest in the product itself, so I will be sure to make my feelings known from now on! Right or not, I think e-books should be priced lower than the average going price of a paperback book-I especially want to know that the authors are being compensated as I'd like them to keep writing new books ;)

:book2:
I practically Lived in my local B&N-a visit on the weekends normally turned out to be a whole day and 2 shopping bag affair, but when Wal-Mart/BJ's/Amazon and local Grocery stores carry the same books at a much lower price, I wave to B&N as I go by.

So far,my Kindle purchases have been inline with that. I'm not a big fan of Hard Cover books... HC's were unwieldy and in earlier days, too expensive. In looking at the few HC's I do have, they were Always books that either hadn't been released in MMPB or, I just couldn't wait for them to be released (sadly, much rarer these days).

While I've found several books on Amazon that I'm interested in, so far only 1 (Predictably Irrational) has had the $9.99 price... the rest have been less expensive than the MMPB version I would have brought before the Kindle... so, I am buying More books with the same amount of money (wheee!:bookworm:)

Content may be part of what drives the prices on what I've purchased so far. I tend to read history, MMPB thrillers, mysteries, romances, social psychology and interactions (gag, but just 1!)and occasionally, NYT best sellers. Prior to having the kindle with me at all times, cereal boxes, the back of register receipts, and the free booklets at the grocery store were also part of that group. For the most part, I've lucked out in that the prices for most of the books I've purchased have been in line with my discount bookseller prices. I admit, there are a few books that I've marked for later, in case the prices come down, but that really isn't any different than my B&N/discount store decisions.

Thank you for an excellent, interesting view into what your thoughts are on the subject, I truly enjoyed reading each of your posts.

When sir is the last time you went to a book store? Most MMPBs that I see at your typical Barnes & Nobel are $9+, most around $12-$15. The NYT best sellers are usually discounted 25% of their list price... but not everyone only buys NYT best sellers.

BOb

Huh? Standard cover price for Mass Market PBs is $5.99 to $8.99 (the average being $7.99), occasionally there will be one for $9.99 (never seen one higher than $9.99 and I do a lot of book buying). Anything higher puts the pricing in the range of Trade Paperbacks which are a different animal.

I recently bought the 5 volumes of Kasparov's 'Great Predecessors' chess books.

It was cheaper to buy them from Amazon (US) than from Amazon (UK) - even with the cost of international shipping :(.

Really? When I compared things that way the last time (which, I admit, has been a good while ago), ordering from Amazon.de won out over ordering from Amazon.com (due to S&H), which in turn was way cheaper than buying from the local book shop, where a USD 7 MMPB would usually cost me upwards of EUR 10. :-(

Have you considered trying to sell them non-exclusive eRights? That would at least let you sell the ebook somewhere else, too. Alternatively, have you considered selling to Baen, who at least get it?

Yes to both. We (my agent and I) tried to do the non-exclusive thing on our last contract round: they made a deal-breaker of the exclusive rights. I've considered selling to Baen ... but I'm not prepared to take the 50% pay cut it would entail. (Moving publisher is pretty damned serious -- it's the equivalent of changing your day job. And under some circumstances it can involve the equivalent of losing seniority, as well as angling for a promotion.) For the time being, I just have to grit my teeth and keep nudging in the right direction. And I'm not the only author in that position.

(There's other stuff going on that I can't write about in public. If you run into me at an SF convention, join me for a beer and I'll talk about it instead :) )

Yes to both. We (my agent and I) tried to do the non-exclusive thing on our last contract round: they made a deal-breaker of the exclusive rights. I've considered selling to Baen ... but I'm not prepared to take the 50% pay cut it would entail. (Moving publisher is pretty damned serious -- it's the equivalent of changing your day job. And under some circumstances it can involve the equivalent of losing seniority, as well as angling for a promotion.) For the time being, I just have to grit my teeth and keep nudging in the right direction. And I'm not the only author in that position.

(There's other stuff going on that I can't write about in public. If you run into me at an SF convention, join me for a beer and I'll talk about it instead :) )
I presume that the "50% pay cut" is in terms of the advance, not in terms of "total long-term royalties." Right? I don't think that there's any reason to expect your books to sell worse over time via a different publisher.

On the other hand, a 50% smaller advance is a big, big, BIG deal. It socks you both in terms of the time value of the money and in terms of certainty of income. That's a really really hard problem to wrestle with. And if Tor will eventually get it w.r.t. eBooks, there'd be no (MobileRead-related) reason to make the switch.

I sure hope that Tor does wind up with reasonable eBook policies. After all, who in the publishing industry wouldn't want to bring in the equivalent of their hard-cover revenues without negative impact on existing revenue from paper sales? And, as a reader, I want to be able to buy reasonably-priced DRM-free, multi-format eBooks.

Xenophon

P.S. I'm all too familiar with pay cuts as a result of job changes. I took a 6x pay cut :eek::eek::eek: to go back to grad school for my Ph.D. Now that I'm done, my salary as a post-doc goes up by a factor of three -- all the way back to 50% of what I made in industry... 10 years ago! :smack: I can't wait to get back to a real job...

I sure hope that Tor does wind up with reasonable eBook policies. After all, who in the publishing industry wouldn't want to bring in the equivalent of their hard-cover revenues without negative impact on existing revenue from paper sales? And, as a reader, I want to be able to buy reasonably-priced DRM-free, multi-format eBooks.

Amen to that.

Huh? Standard cover price for Mass Market PBs is $5.99 to $8.99 (the average being $7.99), occasionally there will be one for $9.99 (never seen one higher than $9.99 and I do a lot of book buying). Anything higher puts the pricing in the range of Trade Paperbacks which are a different animal.

Actually, he's kind of right.

A lot of publishers now are not running MMPB's for "newer" stuff, instead opting to go PB at $12 to $15. For the few books that hit it big, they go MMPB , but most of them I've seen are from $9.99 to $11.99.

Every single author on my "list" who is releasing a MMPB this year is at $9.99.

A few are at $11.99 for MMPB.

Wow, I've never seen that & I buy probably 100 MMPB's a year (or did until I got my Sony, although I still check prices). I've seen the $9.99 ones, but those have been the "deluxe" MMPB's that are taller than regular ones.

Wow, I've never seen that & I buy probably 100 MMPB's a year (or did until I got my Sony, although I still check prices). I've seen the $9.99 ones, but those have been the "deluxe" MMPB's that are taller than regular ones.

My wife usually picks up the latest books in the Star Trek collections. These usually have prices more the 9.99 if I remember correctly. Unless she gets them at Walmart. Then again, I am getting "old".

BOb

Here's the thing about mass market paperbacks: in the USA (not in the UK -- at least, not since 1991) they're sold on much the same basis as magazines. Shops buy them and pay the publisher for the number of books they bought at wholesale price, put them in the racks for a couple of months, then remove them and return them to the publisher for a refund in full. However, rather than ship gazillions of paperbacks about, they merely strip off the covers and return those (which saves a lot of money -- returned MMPBs are unlikely to sell and the publisher will be left paying a refund and warehousing costs out of pocket). The stripped books are then pulped.

Trade paperbacks and hardbacks are not sale or return items, and are not stripped/pulped if they don't sell -- they can be returned for a refund but will end up back in the warehouse and going out again until they're sold.

Obviously these models are grotesquely inappropriate for ebook sales -- but as I noted earlier, the big publishers aren't nimble enough to re-organize their internal business structure to adapt to the new market. As it is, they see ebooks as just a funny new-fangled distribution channel for an electronic equivalent of the dead-tree editions they're used to shipping -- treating the ebook market any differently might actually require someone to think about things, and That Would Never Do.

So, it looks like we can't count on existing publishers to drop the prices, right ? The way I see it we have to wait for startups.

Looks that way. As long as ebooks remain a small niche product that really doesn't affect the bottom line either way, they won't see any reason to lower prices on them to remain competitive.

It'll happen eventually, but I don't think we'll see the explosion in interest and low rates like we saw with MP3's. Sad fact is, most people don't read. If the majority of the mainstream public don't read cheap paperbacks on a regular basis, they certainly won't pay for an ereader even if the cost came way down.

Bookshops in the UK tend to merely replace the "$" with a "£" when it comes to setting prices :).

In Canada they keep the "$" but add 5-20% to the amount, even though the Cdn $ and US $ have been almost identical for quite some time. I am always happy to spend $5.99 US for an ebook instead of $9.99 Cdn for the same book in paperback.

So, it looks like we can't count on existing publishers to drop the prices, right ? The way I see it we have to wait for startups.

We can if we, for example, don't buy ebooks that are more expensive than $10.
I don't.

We can if we, for example, don't buy ebooks that are more expensive than $10.
I don't.

That might give them an excuse to say "See ? There's no demand for ebooks." and continue doing nothing.

That might give them an excuse to say "See ? There's no demand for ebooks." and continue doing nothing.
true. we should all write to them regularly and complain (politely) about the prices instead, and explain they are the reason we're not buying ebooks.

IMHO the best way of reducing ebook prices in the long term would be to buy as many and as pricy books as possible. The publishing houses will not be enthusiastic participants in the ebook revolution if they are constantly nagged by stingy ebook customers arguing that an ebook is something less than a paper book and should therefore subsequently cost less.

Prices will not go down before the marked mechanisms dictate them to do so. And these mechanisms will not come into play before the ebook business gain some momentum and volume.

Given the current and future cost of the liseuses, such volume will not come from the cost-conscious who uses the e-book as a cheap substitute for paper, but from people who have realized (as we all have :)) that e is superior to p - no matter the cost.

That might give them an excuse to say "See ? There's no demand for ebooks." and continue doing nothing.

Then they will loose. Whether they like it or not we are moving towards digital books, it is just a matter of time. So if they want to say "see?", they will be out of business.

Then they will loose. Whether they like it or not we are moving towards digital books, it is just a matter of time. So if they want to say "see?", they will be out of business.

That won't happen. Yeah, we're moving to digital books, but extremely slowly. Honestly, book publishers have probably got a good decade or two before eBooks become truly mainstream (or maybe never, as I said before, most people don't read, so the issue could be moot).

And they're not exactly struggling as it is. Even a ton of people not buying eBooks wouldn't particularly influence their bottom, especially enough to put them out of business.

What we should do is if we see an eBook that is priced higher then the pBook edition then email the shop and tell them of the discrepancy. Sometimes it does work. I've done it before and gotten the prices reduced.

What shops were most responsive to your requests?