The abysmal pricing of ebooks...

[HarryT]

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

[cstross]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

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.

[Greg Anos]

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.

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by Gudy

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

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

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

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by cstross

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

[Spellbot 5000]

Originally Posted by HarryT

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.

[beschuit]

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.

[Spellbot 5000]

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.

[Liviu_5]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

T

My point it, it is certainly doable.

BOb

Videophones are doable too

[cstross]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

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.

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by cstross

It's all about internal publishing industry politics.

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

Originally Posted by cstross

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.

Originally Posted by cstross

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

[Ceili]

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


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!)

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.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

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.

[Gudy]

Originally Posted by Sparrow

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. :-(