Are The Days Of The $14.99 Ebook Numbered?
 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremygr...book-numbered/

How can the price drop on a few "bestsellers" mean that prices are lower across the board? There are still plenty of $14.99 and higher ebook bestsellers out there.
Apache

Yeah that article is not very well resarched or thought out.

It would be nice if it were actual. Certainly there are far too many ebooks at prices higher than even their pbook siblings. Ebooks are more convenient in that you can download them in a few seconds after purchase, but it doesn't make sense that they cost more than the same text on paper which takes longer to arrive.

I'll believe it when the eBook of Dune (NOOK version) drops to a reasonable price.

Personally, I just boycott ebooks that are that high in cost. $9.99 is my ceiling. If there isn't enough profit to go around at that price, then there's a problem.

Same here. I refuse to pay more than what a paperback would cost me.

Back to the article, once they start reducing the prices, more price reductions will come, especially if more people stop paying the $14.99 prices, and they will once they see lower prices can happen. Even though I love reading on my ereader, I'd buy the paperback if it was a book I really wanted to read and couldn't get it through my public library.

My experience has been the opposite lately; I've been ordering more physical books online rather than buying the ebook versions because the physical books are the same price or cheaper. Apparently having a book printed, bound and then hand delivered to me from 200 miles away is still less costly than delivering me a digital copy.

Maybe I should read more bestsellers, or restrict myself to those rare Kobo books that actually allow a discount code to be used.

A New York Times article last month pointed out how the expected drop in prices hasn't really happened:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/te...echnology&_r=0

I'd say you need to look at more than a handful of best sellers to really figure out what's going on with ebook pricing.

My sentiment exactly. How many copies does a bestseller sell? 100,000? That would come to a cool million, should be enough for everyone involved in producing it.

I don't begrudge anyone the right to charge what they want for their book. It isn't a necessity. But if someone charges $14.99 for their book, I'm probably not buying it. An author is free to "this is enough money for me to make on this", but most people would charge what would bring in the maximum revenue. Multiply the total items sold by the price per item. At some point, you maximize the revenue. It's often not easy to determine what that ideal price is. Some people charge less to maximize the number or readers, and this can make sense if they are trying to get their name out there. And I have seen some authors who charge more than this ideal price because it makes them feel cheap to charge a lesser amount, even if it brings in greater total revenue. It seems like foolish pride to me, but it's not my business.

I pretty much do the same thing.

I just looked up a book, thinking my husband would be interested in it - the new Bart Eherman book on biblical forgeries. They wanted $22 for the *ebook* - nuh-huh, not going to happen.

we wait patiently for 9.99 book

I'm with you! I've not bought lots of books because of this.

Same here. I've been buying nothing but hard copies lately. For the same price or even a tad more I'd rather have a physical item.

You could buy the hardback for $39!

I've almost never paid $14.99 for a ebook. Not fiction anyways. I try to get them for $8 or $9 plus the 40% off coupon from Kobo.

Is that like an academic treatise? They are often more expensive since their sales are limited to those with specific interest in the subject.

If it's an academic or scientific book, it will allways be quite expensive since there are only a few copies of the printed book. You can easilily go to a library and get your copy there if you're interested in such books. That's the reason why libraries exist..

I don't read the "bestsellers" so their pricing doesn't affect me. But I have found that even though I much prefer to read on my Nook tablet than a print copy, when it comes to nonfiction, I cannot justify paying the price asked for an ebook that I do not own. Consequently, I continue to buy nonfiction in hardcover. And price is not a determining factor when it comes to hardcover purchases (e.g., I recently bought a hardcover for $55 and another for $45). Ownership and ability to lend and resell are important considerations.

However, I also "buy" a lot of ebooks. But my top price is $4.99 and I rarely spend more than $2.99 for an ebook. Of the ebooks I "buy", 90%+ cost zero dollars. Then if I read an ebook by an author and find that I really enjoy the ebook and the ebook's quality, I will then buy subsequent ebooks by the author or in the series at prices up to $4.99.

I see no reason to pay more than that for an ebook.

I really have no set limit for nonfiction. It depends on the book. For a lot of nonfiction the paper version works best so I buy that.

For a backlist non-omnibus novel my limit for an ebook is $6.99. Especially if I'm just replacing the paper version since I already bought it once. I might go higher than $10 for a new release if I desperately wanted to read it RIGHT NOW and I hadn't anything else I wanted to read. It hasn't happened yet, but I suppose it might be remotely possible. Right now I'm trying to work through my several hundred already paid for books that I haven't had time to read and only really good prices tempt me to buy now instead of putting them on a wish list to buy later.

It looks like it. A lot of his books are more "popularizations," but this is apparently more academic.

On the other hand... As ereaders become cheaper and more alluring to the most casual reader, someone who only reads new releases or a few books a year, price isn't much of an issue.

Why didn't you buy it in the recent SF Gateway sale? £2.99 - about $5.

Pretty sure it's a different publisher in the US Harry.

That's because it's only currently out in hardback. The price will fall when the paperback is released. As a rule, though, non-fiction does tend to be more expensive than fiction. It's a much smaller market.

It's easy enough to buy UK books from the US if you want to do so.

I will not pay more than $3.99 for a fiction ebook. That's just my ceiling and I am not going over it. I will pay more for a non-fiction book, however. Since I am reading a lot of non-fiction books about The Civil War and various books on Native Americans this year, I have paid up to $14.99 for some of the Shelby Foote books regarding The Civil War.

It's your personal choice, of course, but that does seem to be placing a very low value on the work involved in writing a book. That's about a third the price of a typical paperback in the UK.

True, but it's not completely non-trivial

I miss the good old days when the booksellers didn't care where you lived.

I have paid $14.99 for an ebook. I prefer ebooks to paperback because I can change the font size. But the more a book costs, the less likely I am to buy it. If I have a group of 5 books I'd like to read and the one I most want to read is $14.99 but the second choice is $7, I'll almost certainly get the second choice.

I think when you're buying a brand new book, if it's important for you to read the book soon after it comes out, you'll probably pay a premium for that. There are a few authors where I'll buy the book right away when it comes out no matter the cost, but for the most part I can wait until the price drops, or just choose something else. There are lots of books to choose from.

Yes that was really great. I could choose if someone reads the book aloud over the telephone or if I'd like to wait two months for shipment of the printed copy.

Good old days. :o

here here!

if the ebook is sold at a higher price than the paperback i can do without (after checking overdrive of course)

most annoying are those sales (remaindered) of hardcovers for a few bucks and the ebook is "full price"

so far other than a few ebooks from baen i've purchased exactly 1 at full price - "a dance with dragons" - COULD NOT RESIST

so we are told - no clue on how that is done though

was on SFgateway for the first time last night but wasn't able to actually purchase anything
mostly was sent off to find on amazon just to find out there is no ebook of whatever i was interested in
sigh, want to get my hands/eyeballs on some older SF/Fantasy (that is not priced uhm, stupidly) but not having much luck

Personally I'm not prepared to pay more than about £2-£2.50, but as I don't buy newly released books, I could pick any of them up secondhand for £1.50-£2, and I'm prepared to pay a little more for the convenience of not having to actually go out and buy them.

It might be, but at that price I have so many good books to read. Why would I pay more?

The thing with ebooks is there are really no MPB, remainder, or bargain bin equivalent.

This will be a problem down the road. What happens in ten or twenty years, when paper books are a high-priced niche item, like 33 RPM records today? There will be so few paper books going into the used marketplace that the price of used books -- now often little more than the cost of postage -- will skyrocket. Without competition from used books and the bargain bin, publishers will be able to raise prices.

If I'm right, the days of the $14.99 major publisher eBook could indeed by numbered at, oh, say, 5,000. After that, you won't find 'em that cheap.

Or it could go the other way, with publishers forced to lower prices due to competition from self-published and/or pirated books. Nobody knows.

I'm with the $3.99 maximum folks... I'm finding PLENTY of interesting fiction at that price or lower, and although I have a bunch of books on my "to read" list, most of them are from publishers trying to get $12 - $14 or even MORE...

I just always remember the process those e-books are part of... Author to publisher who edits and prints VERY expensive hard covers. And MAKES money. Then prints cheaper, but still very expensive, paperbacks. And MAKES money. And does basically NOTHING (half the time it doesn't even look like they did a decent proof read and reformat) to create an e-book and tries to get MORE than the paperback and POSSIBLY MORE than the hard cover...

A recent example is the re-release of the John D McDonald books. I read MANY Travis McGee paperbacks when younger... If I recall correctly, they went for somewhere between $0.50 and $1.00. So, when I saw the topic I figured, "Great, I'll go get 'em ALL." Til I saw that they wanted $8 - $9 for each of 'em... IF the publisher or whoever is setting the price decides they'd rather sell a lot of books for $2.99 instead of fewer for $9, I'll buy the whole bunch. Til then, nope.