Quote:
Originally Posted by Moejoe
Back onto the price of books, and I've been thinking a lot about this recently, I reckon a price of £2 - 2.50 is reasonable for a brand new novel, £0.99 for any back-catalogue stuff, and around 10p for a short story.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by PKFFW
The net is more open to scams than anything else. It's biggest advantage is exactly what you are proclaiming as the biggest advantage to writers. The FREE or LOW COST scam! So easy to convince someone to part with a little bit of money, to give something a try, to take a punt on the unknown.
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Those two unconnected paragraphs pretty much summed up a thought that popped into my head as I was reading this thread: smaller prices can mean more sales, because there is often less thought put into purchases that don't cost much.
My sister and niece regularly buy ringtones and screensavers for their mobile/cell phones. The price is about £2 ($3-ish), and most of the time the attraction lasts a very short time, before the next is purchased. The costs are small enough that it is seen by them as an acceptable impulse buy.
I would view e-books in the same vein: if the cost was low enough, then I'd happily snap up copies of books (whether they are ones I have already read, or new ones) with the feeling that I could read them whenever I chose to, and I hadn't really lost much if I never got round to reading them at all.
I would expect to pay a higher premium for a newly released e-book, but I would then (as now, with paper books) decide whether I want it badly enough to pay the higher price or wait until it drops.
The aesthetic value of an item also affects how much I would pay for an item: I'd happily pay £100 for a specially bound edition of Lord of the Rings, but I'm not going to pay £15 for what is essentially a text file just so I can stick it on my e-reader. I'd rather buy a paper copy of the book (which would also be cheaper than £15), and *gulp* destroy it to produce an e-book from it. At least that way there is a larger chain of people that have benefited from me buying the paper book.
As for books that I don't value as highly as LotR, I wouldn't bother buying them again in e-book format unless it was at the lower 'throwaway' price.