Quote:
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.