Cutting Prices is the only way to stop piracy

[queentess]

Originally Posted by richrock

I was specifying the content - I certainly don't buy books for the purty covers or whatever. I buy a book because the subject interests me, or the story seems compelling. However, I am not paying for natural resources used to create that book, so why pay the premium? Competitive pricing of ebooks compared to paper books irrespective of content would lead to greater sales of the e-version, and subsequently less damage done by piracy.

Someone somewhere (publisher? someone really good at estimating things?) that the physical medium makes up only about 10% of a book's cost (my Google ability is failing me right now, but I read about it here on MR). If you're inclined to believe that, it's not a huge impact. And just because the publisher has fewer costs doesn't mean they're required to pass on the savings to the consumer.

I don't want to pay $15 for an ebook because I rarely paid that for a pbook. And I consider ebooks to be inferior to pbooks because I can't loan them to my family or resell them. However, they also are more portable and don't take up space in my house (so long expensive bookshelves!), so they're also superior to pbooks in some regards. And I can't get over how easy it is to search ebooks and highlight (without leaving physical marks in the book!!). I love it.

[wyndslash]

i would prefer if they used paper from farmed trees to make pbooks.

[Adriaan12452]

Originally Posted by sabredog

Cutting prices is a good start.

But making ebooks more accessible by doing away with geo restrictions and DRM would go a long way to eliminating casual piracy by those who are quite happy to purchase an ebook title, but cannot due to geo restrictions and non availability of that DRM'ed ebook in the format suitable for their ereader.

That would certainly help a lot. Also the prices of the ebooks should be considerably lower. Amazon charges as much, if not more, for scientific ebooks as for the real scientific books while the costs of distribution are much lower (maybe not 50% but enough).

[queentess]

Originally Posted by Adriaan12452

Come on guys, if one pays €100 for the fourth edition of a book one expects
at the very least a solid cover, non-glossy pages and nonsmearing ink.

I once bought (maybe 15 years ago) a $30 brand new hardcover Stephen King book, which I promptly read without the dust jacket (who reads with those things on?), and it stained my hands black for days. It was also one of the last hardcovers I bought.

[queentess]

Originally Posted by Adriaan12452

That would certainly help a lot. Also the prices of the ebooks should be considerably lower. Amazon charges as much, if not more, for scientific ebooks as for the real scientific books while the costs of distribution are much lower (maybe not 50% but enough).

Do tell, what is a "real scientific book"?

Also, let me fix this for you:
"PUBLISHER charges as much, if not more, for scientific ebooks as for the real scientific books"

[leebase]

Originally Posted by Adriaan12452

At this moment many scientific books cost over $150 for about 800-1200 pages, a paperback edition. With all due respect, anyone who doesn't find that excessively expensive is in my opinion out of his mind.

How many more such books do you think the author will sell at $5? It's a niche market and the author has to make his money on fewer people. Take away that high price and you'll find almost no such books will be produced.

Lee

[CyGuy]

There is a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of publishers/authors/resellers. They seem to have this "you rented/leased the eBook" mentality. The truth is that you purchased the book. That being said:

A radical price reduction is an obvious first step.
DRM in any form should be illegal an not tolerated by anyone, anywhere, at any time.
There should be no such thing as "GEO restrictions".
The eBook should be available in any format you want, and you should be able to format shift at will.

This would reduce piracy, but it will likely never end...

[Adriaan12452]

Originally Posted by queentess

Someone somewhere (publisher? someone really good at estimating things?) that the physical medium makes up only about 10% of a book's cost (my Google ability is failing me right now, but I read about it here on MR).

I bet that these costs are a lot higher for color and pictures than for plain text. That should influnce the percentage.
When I buy a book of €150 and only €15 is for the printing costs (it should be higher for many scientific books because of the many pictures and the volume but for the sake of the argument) then where does that other €135 goes to? I am more than willing to give the writer a decent fee, I also have no problem with the publisher making a small profit but €135...?

Originally Posted by queentess

I once bought (maybe 15 years ago) a $30 brand new hardcover Stephen King book, which I promptly read without the dust jacket (who reads with those things on?), and it stained my hands black for days. It was also one of the last hardcovers I bought.

Originally Posted by queentess

Do tell, what is a "scientific book"?

Books for mathematics and for subjects which use the scientific method. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Method
These books often ar quite thick and contain a lot of pictures which should make them more expensive but not that much more expensive.

Also, let me fix this for you:
"PUBLISHER charges as much, if not more, for scientific ebooks as for the real scientific books"

I just used Amazon as a reference, I don't blame Amazon.

[Adriaan12452]

Originally Posted by leebase

How many more such books do you think the author will sell at $5? It's a niche market and the author has to make his money on fewer people. Take away that high price and you'll find almost no such books will be produced.

Lee

Let's start with $30-$60 (depending on the volume etc.) instead of $150 and I'm already very pleased.
You need to buy about a dozen of those books for one year at university so that makes a lot of difference to the students.

You're absolutely right that the price has to be higher because it's a smaller market but why on earth do publishers need to make a considerable profit for those kind of books. Why not settle for a small profit? Just enough to keep the company going. Compare the prices for different publishers and for different decades (while correcting for inflation) and draw your conclusions. It certainly doesn't help that most scientific books nowadays are being published by just two publishers: Pearson and Elsevier.

I'm a reasonable guy, I understand that the authors need to be compensated for their time and that's fine to me. I realize that a publisher has to make a small profit because it sometimes needs to invest to keep the company going. I'm more than willing to pay fair prices for music, video and books, as much as I can afford (buying some and downloading others is a fair policy in my opinion if you can't afford to buy more) but the prices have to be realistic.

[queentess]

Originally Posted by Adriaan12452

Books for mathematics and for subjects which use the scientific method. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Method
These books often ar quite thick and contain a lot of pictures which should make them more expensive but not that much more expensive.

While that is a clever misquotation, what I actually asked was:

Originally Posted by queentess

Do tell, what is a "real scientific book"?

Trying to understand why you consider ebooks to be different from "real" books.

Originally Posted by Adriaan12452

Amazon charges as much, if not more, for scientific ebooks as for the real scientific books while the costs of distribution are much lower (maybe not 50% but enough).

[Hellmark]

You will never totally get rid of piracy. Pirates tend to fall into 3 groups, in my experience.

You have the people who simply find that it is more than they can afford, but would buy at lower prices, you have the people who pirate because it is easier (no DRM, etc), and then you have the people who would never buy at any price.

I'll admit that I have pirated before. There were a few times I pirated because of DRM. I remember when the game based on the 2003 version of the Hulk movie came out, I got it and due to a bug in the DRM I was unable to play it. Vivendi knew of the bug and refused to patch it. They actually ended up offering refunds to the effected people instead of fixing it. The pirated version had the DRM stripped, and would play fine. I didn't accept the refund, and played the pirated version. I've also pirated things when it was not available.

From studies I've seen, and anecdotes from various companies, when you have things that are cheap and easy to get sales will increase. 2d Boy found that roughly 82% of copies of their game World of Goo were pirated. They then started having sales, even one where people named their own price, and sales picked up. They didn't add DRM, because according to them, the people remaining wouldn't ever buy. When they ran the name your own price sale, they asked everyone who bought then why they chose the price they did, and 22% (the largest group) said they did that because it was what they could afford. Nearly 8% said that they were going simply legit. Also take a look next at iTunes. Here is an example of making it cheap and easy to get music, and sales have skyrocketed.

With the latter group, who never will buy, they also often have a pokemon "Gotta catch them all" mentality, where they pirate lots of things because they can, but most of the time never use it. Pinch Media showed this in their study of iOS devices.

Now, if we forget about that latter group, we can see that having lower more affordable prices will get more sales.

[Andrew H.]

The referenced study relates to piracy in places like Brazil and Russia, where piracy is endemic, and suggests as a cause the fact that DVDs cost proportionately 5-6 times more in those countries than in the more developed world - i.e., the DVDs cost the same, but the median income is more like $8,000/year. Which would be an equivalent price in the US of $50-$100 for a DVD.

I don't think it's very relevant to the phenomenon of piracy in the US or Europe, where even very cheap products are pirated.

[elcreative]

As long as you're the arbiter of realistic as opposed to reality... I have enough to read now for the rest of my life so I'm really going to enjoy laughing at many on this site when, in a few years, the B&M sellers and many publishers cease to exist (if most people here get there way) and you start moaning even louder about the dearth of good books or the difficulty of separating them from the dross... Same for uni books... spend ten years producing a study book that's going to sell a few hundred copies and I'm supposed to sell for $30... say I sell 300 copies... wow that's $9000 for a work I've taken ten years to complete... you're all so generous...

Originally Posted by Adriaan12452

Let's start with $30-$60 (depending on the volume etc.) instead of $150 and I'm already very pleased.
You need to buy about a dozen of those books for one year at university so that makes a lot of difference to the students.

You're absolutely right that the price has to be higher because it's a smaller market but why on earth do publishers need to make a considerable profit for those kind of books. Why not settle for a small profit? Just enough to keep the company going. Compare the prices for different publishers and for different decades (while correcting for inflation) and draw your conclusions. It certainly doesn't help that most scientific books nowadays are being published by just two publishers: Pearson and Elsevier.

I'm a reasonable guy, I understand that the authors need to be compensated for their time and that's fine to me. I realize that a publisher has to make a small profit because it sometimes needs to invest to keep the company going. I'm more than willing to pay fair prices for music, video and books, as much as I can afford (buying some and downloading others is a fair policy in my opinion if you can't afford to buy more) but the prices have to be realistic.

[Angst]

There are a number of parallels between the price of ebooks now and cigarette prices in Canada a couple of decades ago.

Cigarette prices had risen so high, due to government taxation, smugglers were buying cigarettes at cost in the US and smuggling them back into Canada. At the apogee of the crisis, a surveillance video tape surfaced showing thieves breaking into a convenience store, ignoring the cash register, and sweeping cigarettes into bins.

As prices for ebooks rise, more and more people will turn to the darknet for their ebooks. It is only since the agency 5, (now agency 6), started pricing ebooks higher than pbooks that I have even considered the darknet as an alternative source for books.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by queentess

Someone somewhere (publisher? someone really good at estimating things?) that the physical medium makes up only about 10% of a book's cost

It certainly sounds like something a publisher would say. But they are basing those figures on the total cost of bringing a story to market. Most of that cost will be spent on editing, design and marketing, plus business lunches and bribes for distributors/chain-stores. All of those are costs associated with the original print edition.

The ebook edition comes later, when (hopefully) all of those costs have been recouped. At that point, the differences in production and distributor costs become more apparent. Amazon takes a 30% cut for distribution, compared with the 50% a traditional distributor would take. And, obviously, there are no print/transportation/warehousing costs associated with ebooks.