[Worldwalker]

I am not well-off. My ebook reader was a major purchase for me. I bought it specifically because I love classic books (currently reading Allan Pinkerton's books on his experiences as a detective), many of which aren't available on dead trees at all, and those that are, in addition to the expense, would further burden my groaning bookshelves. What I want to read changes with my mood and situation; I used to carry several books with me to have a choice; now I just carry my ebooks. When it comes to printed books, I wait for the mass market paperback, and even then, I wait for sales (in fact, I got my 505 on sale) or use coupons. No, just because I own an ebook reader does not mean that I can afford inflated prices for ebooks; it means that I have hundreds of dollars less in my book-buying budget than I had before.

Yet the publishing industry wants me to pay the full, undiscounted and undiscountable hardcover list price for a book that I'll be reading on a postcard-sized screen, probably with formatting issues. It's a book that I can't lend to my mother, or sell to the used book store when I'm done, or even donate to the library book sale. In short, as so many people have mentioned above, they want me to pay more and get less.

With an ebook, the publisher has no printing costs. They have no distribution costs. They have no returns and remainders. They have no loss and damage. As a result, their profit on an ebook is an order of magnitude higher than that of a paper book, and with zero risk to them besides. No worries about the size of the print run; the supply always meets the demand. Yet they want to charge as much -- or more! -- for something that costs them a fraction as much, and carries infinitely less risk, and demand that they, not the retailer, have the authority to set that retailer's prices.

I suspect that one of the biggest things holding back wider adoption of ebook reading devices is not the lack of color (few general reading books are anything but black and white), nor the time to turn a page (it's a lot less intrusive, and a lot faster, than doing it physically!) -- in short, none of the things that "the industry", whoever it may be, blames. No, the biggest barrier to reader sales is the price of books. People don't buy ebook readers because they'll pay more to get less, above and beyond the price of the reader itself.

Anyone here remember laser discs? The kind the size of a record album? The ones that cost upwards of a hundred dollars each, and needed a thousand-dollar-plus player? Not very many people bought them. Now consider DVDs. You can buy a DVD player for twenty bucks on sale. The average new release movie sells for fifteen or twenty bucks, and if you wait a while, you can get it on sale for ten. Plus there's the Wal-Mart bargain bin, used DVD stores, package deals of all sorts ... and how many DVDs does the average person own? I have hundreds. I've spent far more on DVDs than I ever did on laserdiscs (which was, um, zero) and therefore Hollywood has made a lot more money from me.

If the publishing industry gets a clue, they'll realize the future of ebooks is in volume. If the market will buy, say, ten ebooks at $1 profit each, or 1 ebook at $10 profit, it makes sense for the publisher to set their price for the $1 profit because -- aside from the benefit to society -- the cheaper ebooks will encourage people to buy ebook readers, and therefore increase the publisher's market even further. Next year, all those people who saw their friends reading cheap ebooks might have readers of their own, and suddenly the publisher will be selling 20 books where they sold 10 before. And it doesn't cost them any more to produce 20 ebooks than it does 10, or 1.

It's not worth trying to push the benefit to society angle on major publishers. Like most corporations, they see everything as a zero-sum game. If something helps their customers, or everyone, or anyone, it must hurt them in some way. So (with a few exceptions, like Baen) they'll see a benefit to society as a point against doing something, rather than in favor of it.

Oh, speaking of Baen, the Baen Free Library is the worst thing that ever happened to my book-buying budget. It's the literary equivalent of a drug dealer giving out free samples. As if I wasn't buying enough from them already, that blasted thing got me hooked on several more series ... and I've ended up buying dead-trees copies of books that I already had as ebooks, after buying the later ones on paper, because I'm kind of OCD about sets of things.

Kind of funny, isn't it? The company that's trying to keep their prices as high as possible, and give the least value for the customer's money they possibly can, and will undoubtedly send their corporate nazgul after anyone caught reading their books without paying, has gotten exactly $0 from me. I just don't buy (or read) books I can't afford. The company that gives me free books, on the other hand, has probably gotten more of my business, at least in per-unit sales, than any of their competitors (probably not in raw dollars, because one technical reference can cost me as much as a dozen MM paperbacks, and I have to buy those, but certainly for my pleasure reading). They give me samples, they have paper books at reasonable prices and DRM-free ebooks even cheaper if I prefer that format, or if the book isn't available on paper. It's not even a matter of "well, they're nice people so I'll buy from them" -- it's a good business decision for me to buy books from them because they give me a better deal than their competitors.

The publishing industry is trying to solve the wrong problem. They're trying to solve the problem of "how do we get the maximum profit from each ebook we sell?" and "how do we prevent ebook sales from cannibalizing hardcover sales?" The real question they should be asking is "How can we get the maximum profit from this particular book?" ... and the answer to that question is more likely to be "sell it as an ebook, cheap, so a zillion people buy it" than "try to restrict the market and jack up the price".