This started off as a rant, but developed into some interesting information about current availability and pricing of ebooks. It's only fair to say that I don't yet know how much of my experiences are due to being in the middle of the changeover and how much is what we can look forward to.
I have been eagerly awaiting the publication of Megan Whalen Turner’s Conspiracy of Kings for some months and added it to my fictionwise basket as soon as it was in their store last Monday. However as I've been dealing with a major computer crash, I delayed buying the book until my new computer had arrived and I could install ADE. Big mistake given that -- as we now know -- all HarperCollins books were going to disappear overnight.
In general, I'm prepared to give fictionwise a little time to see whether they can get new arrangements put in place with the agency publishers, but in this case I REALLY want this book now. So at the weekend, given books seem to be reappearing at Sony and Amazon at least, I went hunting. I'm not keen on the idea of installing yet more proprietary software, so rather than try Amazon or Sony, I went straight to the HarperCollins website. But how strange -- I could search for the book and find out it was published in hardcover or e-book format, but there was no link to actually buy direct from the publisher. Instead there was a list of popular retailers, listing several stores from which it could be bought (fictionwise, diesel, books on board etc -- at least a dozen of the usual suspects); sadly it had been withdrawn from most of them.
So I resolved to be patient, but while I was online, I followed a link from author Melissa Marr's website to
http://www.harperteen.com/feature/StoppingTime/ where I was able to download a couple of free books; and this was a HarperCollins website with a "buy now" button for her book Ink Exchange. "Perhaps, I thought HarperCollins do sell ebooks directly after all" -- I clicked the buy now link. This took me to a screen with the message "your shopping cart is empty" and the option to "continue shopping". Something had obviously gone wrong with adding the book to my basket. Having hit the back button and tried again a few times, I concluded that no, the website truly wasn't going to let me buy Ink Exchange, despite there being nothing on the Harperteen web page to indicate any problems, so I followed the "continue shopping" link instead. Curiouser and curiouser, this took me back to the website I'd been browsing for Conspiracy of Kings which had a search function and information about all the ebooks, but no option to buy any of them. After following some links and doing some searches, I gave up on Ink Exchange too.
It then occurred to me to see what inkmesh said about the book's availability -- it showed it at Amazon, Sony and HarperCollins. "But HarperCollins don't have a function to buy ebooks" I thought, but I followed inkmesh's link anyway. Wonder of wonders this took me to a different website,
www.harpercollinsebooks.com as opposed to
www.harpercollins.com which I had previously been browsing. Please note that neither individual product pages on
www.harpercollins.com nor the series specific page on
www.harperteen.com gave links to the e-book store where you can actually buy books. However things were now looking a bit more promising, so I tried to add Conspiracy of Kings to my cart -- at this point and not before, I got a message saying " This site is temporarily closed for maintenance; it is not possible to purchase new titles at this time. The ability to download previously purchased titles is unaffected; sign in and visit your 'My library' to download previously purchased titles." Following the link from the individual product page to the e-book store homepage I discovered that they had put that message on their homepage too; the first useful information about buying books I'd seen on any HarperCollins site all weekend.
The bit was now firmly between my teeth, so I thought it might be interesting -- having found HarperCollins' own bookstore -- to check out the new agency prices, even if the books weren't yet available. SoI began with the two books I previously been looking at;
Conspiracy of Kings is priced in hardcover at $16.99. As a new release e-book, it is priced at $12.99. The previous book in the series, the King of Attolia is available in paperback at $7.99; it's e-book price is now $5.99. Likewise Ink Exchange is priced at $8.99 for the paperback and $6.99 for the e-book. So far so good; the differential seems enough to take into account the cheaper production and distribution costs for an e-book. In fact, you're likely to get discounts when buying a physical book, either three-for-the-price-of-two type offers in-store or a discount at Amazon etc, but at least it looked as if the ebooks would be no more expensive than physical copies.
I then went back to
www.harpercollinsebooks.com where I could see actual ebooks for sale and the news was even better; the list e-book prices are discounted by 20%, bringing Conspiracy of Kings down to $10.39, King of Attolia down to $4.79 and Ink Exchange to $5.59. It will be interesting to see whether the publishers allow the same discounts to third-party retailers as they offer on their own websites, but if they do then -- pricing wise at least -- this doesn't look as bad as some of us have feared.
All these books are technically young adult, so while I was online I thought I would look at some other books, and did a search for Terry Pratchett. This is where things got really odd; his books are pretty uniformly priced at $7.99 in paperback; they are also uniformly priced at $11.99 for the ebooks. Why? There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, unless it's because the ebooks seem to have been released en masse in 2007, some years after the physical titles. Unless HarperCollins are still in the middle of the repricing all their books for their own store (not impossible, but in that case all questions about when they will become available at which retailers and at what prices seem premature), this seems utterly mad and not very promising at all.
My conclusions? Only tentative at this stage, but --
1. It's probably too early to tell how long it will take the publishers to sort out the agency model changeover, but if they can't get a seamless transfer for people buying directly from them, it's likely to take even longer for them to roll their books back out to other retailers.
2. Secondly, if they are serious about people buying books from them they really need to make a better job of integrating their various different websites and making it easier to get from a product page to a page where you can actually buy an e-book.
3. And on pricing, some of what they're doing looks very sensible: some of it looks insane and based on 1 and 2 I'd be surprised if they are going to rationalise all their prices very soon.