Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The list price for the paperback edition of this book is £7.99. The e-Book cost me £4.99. e-Books are subject to 20% VAT, unlike e-Books, so excluding VAT the price is £4.16, which is 52% of the paperback price.
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If this was the case market wide then I'd agree entirely with you, on all accounts. Unfortunately, as has been brought up many times before in previous threads, the market is far more fractured than just p versus e prices. Let me give you an example that underlines the problems of geo and currency ignorant pricing.
Black library publishes a series of sci-fi books that is an guilty pleasure of mine. The series is gritty and the protagonists usually die heroically, which is something I enjoy for some morbid reason.
The ebook is €8.99, the pbook is €8.99. Neither of those numbers really bother me, I -am- willing to pay the same price for an ebook as long as I'll enjoy the content. I just refuse to pay -more- for an ebook than a pbook. But here comes the amusing bit. Let's look at international pricing of the ebook.
€8.99 vs $7.99 vs £6.50
When we factor in the currency values the final tally comes to:
Europe $12.5, USA $8, Europe-GB $10.29
Even including 25% vat that US and GB customers won't have to pay that's still just a broken calculation. They've got worldwide rights, there's no bizarre contractual obligations to force them to jack up the price for euro customers. They just do. As do most publishers in almost every industry. I'm really not trying to whine about a 20% (after having added 25% vat) increase in cost for europeans (23% for Europe-GB which is even more bizarre considering black library is based in GB and customers don't pay eu-vat), just keep those numbers in mind.
What I see as the largest danger going forward isn't that publishers will attempt to charge more for their ebooks, as HarryT said it doesn't happen that often (although I seldom if ever find a popular ebook for 50% of its pbook price). The danger is that they will continue to rely upon outdated and ultimately harmful views on capitalization.
I get it, english books probably sell better in usa and uk. When you have to pay for shipping, storage, customs, difference in taxation and whatnot for products that don't sell as well you need to compensate by raising the price. That's totally valid for physical products. And it's entirely bloody invalid for digital ones.
Not like black library is operating out of every european country and thus suffer the cost of unsold merchandise. They're just raising the price because that's what everyone has always done. This, in my humble opinion, signals a reverting to outdated business methods which will ultimately harm the industry more than it will ever help it. It also explains why so many parts of the ebook industry seems to be going backwards instead of forwards.