[Steven Lyle Jordan]

When people tend to talk about micropayment for retail products (yes, at this point it's only a concept), they are talking about carving up cash into smaller increments, say, a hundredth of a cent increments. Today this is actually done with large bulk purchases of small items, but only on paper, with amounts usually rounded up to the nearest cent for accounting purposes.

If you use a system (like PayPal) that charges a transaction fee or tax as a percentage of the sale, you can always approximate the micropayment model by figuring out what is the minimum amount you can sell a product, and lose no more than 1 cent in fees. Example: If you charge 5 cents on a product, and have a 5% fee, you'll actually lose 20% because 1 cent is the smallest amount they can take... you lose on the deal. But if you charge 20 cents, the fee you give up is exactly 1 cent. The larger the fee percent, the smaller the payment can be, to bring you down to 1 cent.

20 cents or less sounds like a very small amount to charge for a book, though if you are popular enough, you could still make a lot of money. Presently it's very hard for anyone but the most popular author to sell exclusively online this way, and make enough to live on. The rest of us would only make a supplementary income at best. But it's so early in the e-book selling model, there hasn't been much experimentation to see what will work and what won't... we're all just guessing and stabbing in the dark, and hoping we find the best selling model.

Someday I might even try the method I outlined above, just to see how I fare in the market with 20 cent books. Will the word get out? Will people make impulse buys of my books at 20 cents, where $2.50 was too much? Will my sales increase overseas, where $2.50 is a much larger proportion of daily income and not as disposable as it is in the developed countries? Who knows? No one... until someone throws it at the wall, and sees if it sticks.