[Xenophon]

HarryT wrote:

Sorry - I really don't agree with you that prices are high. The typical price of a book in the Connect store is something like half, or even less, what it would cost me to buy that same paper book here in the UK.

Harry:

The typical price of a book in the Connect store is within a few percent of what it would cost me to purchase the paper book from Amazon.com or bn.com, including shipping!

Beyond that, I have the example of Baen Books, who have demonstrated that they can make a handy profit on eBooks at about $6.00 per book (for singles) or with bundles of 6-8 books for $15.00 if you purchase the batch of stuff they published in a particular month. And the authors get about the same (or better) royalty payment when compared to a paper sale. And the publisher clears a bit more too. And they're not DRM-crippled either.

I'm NOT going to pay paper-book prices for bits that I won't be able to use in a few years because my reader stops working, or Sony exits the market (or just stops supporting the PRS500). Each of these has happened to me with past reader devices -- they are not straw-man scenarios!

I must respectfully disagree with you again. I think you're doing most users an injustice by saying that they will obtain illegal copies of copyrighted material rather than buy it. I still buy music CDs even though I could trivially download the same music from the Internet "free". Why? Because I'm honest, and I believe that most other users are honest too. BTW, one minor point - releasing illegal copies of copyrighted material onto the Internet certainly does not place it into the "public domain". That is a phrase which has a specific legal meaning, and illegally copied material certainly isn't included in it.

I'm with you on this part, though, especially on the meaning of "public domain" and the willingness of most users to purchase conveniently available, reasonably priced content.

Remember, most of the cost of publishing is not the process of printing the book - it's the work done by the publisher in advance of publication, the cost of which has to be re-couped in the price of the book. I say that as an author. There is a myth that eBooks should somehow be a lot cheaper than printed books. That's simply not true - all the costs other than the relatively minor costs of printing are still there.

I partly agree here. Certainly there are significant editorial costs, as well as proof-reading, copy-editing, and lots of other stuff. On the flip side, these costs are already incurred for the production of the dead-tree edition. In the Baen example above, the eBooks are paying their full share of those costs (amortized over dollar-value-to-Baen of the sales). The costs that are NOT there, however, are the distributor's markup (to cover their overhead and profit) and the retailer's markup (to cover ditto). Baen and Baen's authors do at least as well when you buy bits as they do when you buy dead-tree-in-a-store -- and sometimes a good deal better! And that's at the very reasonable price-points I gave above. With no encryption, no DRM, and no piracy problem.

Given my comparison with purchasing dead-tree editions from Amazon or BN, and my example taken from Baen, I submit that books in the connect store are over priced. And that's for less value due to the DRM, to boot.

Xenophon