The Virtue of High Priced Books

[Giggleton]

Some of the best books I've read have been freely available, as in it was the author's intent to release them for FREE, go figure.

Most of the non-fiction I read needs to be edited before its readable on my Kindle, sometimes I edit a book and then send it to an author so they can reupload

As far as waiting for price drops, I'm actually a fan of one price point to rule them all, 99 cents seems to do allright, and no one would ever have to wait.

[leebase]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

Some of the best books I've read have been freely available, as in it was the author's intent to release them for FREE, go figure.

Most of the non-fiction I read needs to be edited before its readable on my Kindle, sometimes I edit a book and then send it to an author so they can reupload

As far as waiting for price drops, I'm actually a fan of one price point to rule them all, 99 cents seems to do allright, and no one would ever have to wait.

Assuming that the rewards of selling books for $1 are enough to keep folks writing and producing them. There are plenty of ebooks available for that price. Far more than you could possibly read in your lifetime.

Why worry about the books that are priced higher? Let those who desire to charge more service those that are willing to pay more.

Lee

[leebase]

Originally Posted by carld

That's a lot of IF's in your original post leebase. I expect that such situations are very rarely, if ever, the cause of high book prices. I think the reality is just what a lot of us suppose it is, publishers trying to wring every dollar they can out of an outdated pricing model while they still can.

Who needs the services of a publisher?! Surely one need only to put ones book on sale at Amazon for $1 and you can quit your job the next day and be a full time writer.

ok, back to reality. He can't quit his job because he isn't making enough money self publishing. Others have, sure. Very few compared to the many that try.

But IF he was picked up by a publisher who would advance him enough money that he could quit his job. THEN his readers would have access to his books that wouldn't even exist if he had to support himself with a regular job and could only write occasionally.

So the publishers high priced books are PROVIDING his work to his readers and that's so much better than the few cheap books he can produce by himself.

Lee

[GreenMonkey]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

The lack of legit loaning/resale of ebooks is working toward re-establishing access to books as something for the upper classes, or at least removing access from the most impoverished classes of people. The first sacrifice in the ebook-vs-paper publishing wars will be mmpb's--and suddenly, Billy will have a lot fewer chances to find a copy at a yard sale for fifty cents.

I don't mind waiting for lower-priced secondhand books, but I'm baffled that authors & publishers seem to think this is a *good* thing for them. They don't get royalties on those sales. Why not release $5 ebooks instead of telling me to read something they don't get paid for?

I think a lot of the price debates is big publishers not realizing how many book readers *never* paid full price for books, and would be happy to by ebooks at the prices they'd been paying for paper--which had no connection to the prices on the cover.

Yeah. They don't understand that they are attempting to do exactly the same thing as the music industry did. Except the saving grace of the music industry has become $1 tracks you can buy individually - even cheaper than a used CD if you only want one track - so they had somewhere, at least, to backpeddle to.

The price on backlist ebooks should be more in line with the used market. Only huge ebook fans buy a backlist ebook for $8 that they can't share when they could get a paperback for $2 at the local used book store - or a penny + $2.99 shipping from Amazon marketplace. Or, even cheaper - torrent for free a copy that you can share across devices and accounts.

You think that a dropping price over time strategy would come into play for ebooks, in an effort to make money on those that would simply buy used. Somehow they seem to expect that some sort of magic inherent in ebooks will make people pay 4x what it costs to buy a used paperback.

[Joykins]

There's a delicate balance between price and demand, and the type of reader who is purchasing.

For example, a lot of people will pay $25 or more for a hardback Harry Potter book, or a new Michael Connolly book, or a new Stephen King book. For many of those people this may be the only, or one of only a few books they buy that year. These people are price-insensitive; books are not an ongoing expense for them, and while their per capita purchases are very small, probably the majority of people who buy books follow this pattern so the market is huge. So if you want to jack the price up on anything it should be blockbuster bestsellers.

Voracious readers like myself view things differently. We balance perceived value with price. For authors we are fans of, we will pay the "bestseller" price. I read up to 3 books per day, so I try not to buy as much as possible, but when I can get a Harlequin romance at $3.50 I might pass up what seems to be a comparable-quality romance priced at $9.99 and opt for the cheaper book (after all I can get nearly 3 of them for the price of the other book). It depends on how much I WANT that $9.99 book and whether I can get it another cheaper way (library? ebook loan? paperback loan? used pb?).

I have read some books where they were OK but I feel like I paid $5-7 too much for them; they were $2.99 of book quality value in a $9.99 package.

[Giggleton]

Originally Posted by leebase

Why worry about the books that are priced higher? Let those who desire to charge more service those that are willing to pay more.

Why? What gives anyone the right to tell anyone else what they can think/read? If I want to read a book I will, I may or may not send monies to the author.

I might agree that if something is written but not published then only the author has the rights to it, but once another mind cogitates upon the text the viral nature of the word has begun to spread and due to its nature cannot be contained, the word wants to multiply.

Originally Posted by Joykins

I have read some books where they were OK but I feel like I paid $5-7 too much for them; they were $2.99 of book quality value in a $9.99 package.

I don't understand this stuff, how do you say that one book felt like 6.99 but this other one only seemed about 2.50? It's very subjective right? Are you basing this on personal historical reading data?

I must admit that I feel like I am overpaying for ebooks sometimes, I just close my eyes and click the button

But I think it's more of a general thing about digital content and its intangible nature.

[Piper_]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

But otherwise--yes, ebooks have a steep initial investment if you haven't already covered it in other parts of your life. They claim you can use a Kindle without a computer--but they lie; you need an email account to set up all the features. You can't activate the Kindle's web service without setting things up on a computer.

You can set up and use a Kindle 3 without a computer. Regitsering an account, setting everything up, even email, can all be done from the Kindle 3 itself.

(The only thing I can think of that could be a problem would be upgrading the firmware if you can't get to a hotspot, but I expect if you called and told them, they'd make an exception and push it over 3g.)

/

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by GreenMonkey

Yeah. They don't understand that they are attempting to do exactly the same thing as the music industry did. Except the saving grace of the music industry has become $1 tracks you can buy individually - even cheaper than a used CD if you only want one track - so they had somewhere, at least, to backpeddle to.

They're not, though. People often make this claim, but they've forgotten what the music industry's problems actually were.

1. The music industry's first problem was that they didn't provide *any* source for legally buying mp3's, hoping that the napster et al. would just go away.

The book publishers have not done this.

2. The second mistake that music publishers made was, once they decided to make mp3s available, they did so in a disorganized manner...you had to go to each publisher to purchase music initially.

The book publishers have not done this.

3. The third mistake that they made was that they didn't want to sell individual songs - they only gave you the option of buying the entire album.

This isn't relevant to books.

What the music industry didn't do was drastically cut prices - the $10 for an album from iTunes was roughly what it cost to buy a CD at Walmart at the time.

The price on backlist ebooks should be more in line with the used market. Only huge ebook fans buy a backlist ebook for $8 that they can't share when they could get a paperback for $2 at the local used book store - or a penny + $2.99 shipping from Amazon marketplace. Or, even cheaper - torrent for free a copy that you can share across devices and accounts.

You think that a dropping price over time strategy would come into play for ebooks, in an effort to make money on those that would simply buy used. Somehow they seem to expect that some sort of magic inherent in ebooks will make people pay 4x what it costs to buy a used paperback.

There's no point in trying to compete with the used market.

[avantman42]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

There's no point in trying to compete with the used market.

Why not? Surely once you've sold enough e-books at a given price, you can afford to drop the price. At that point, people who would have bought used paper books may buy the e-book.

Most of the paper books I've bought were second hand. I haven't bought a paper book since I bought my Kindle. I rarely (if ever) pay more than £5 for an e-book, I either wait for it to come down in price or I don't buy it. Just last night I checked the price of a book I'm interested in. It's still more than I want to pay, so I didn't buy it. If it ever comes down in price enough, I'll buy it, if not, I'll read something else. My waiting for the price to come down is analogous to waiting to find it second hand when I bought paper books. If the publisher never reduces the price, they'll never get my money, and I think that's a lost opportunity.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by avantman42

Why not? Surely once you've sold enough e-books at a given price, you can afford to drop the price. At that point, people who would have bought used paper books may buy the e-book.

Most of the paper books I've bought were second hand. I haven't bought a paper book since I bought my Kindle. I rarely (if ever) pay more than £5 for an e-book, I either wait for it to come down in price or I don't buy it. Just last night I checked the price of a book I'm interested in. It's still more than I want to pay, so I didn't buy it. If it ever comes down in price enough, I'll buy it, if not, I'll read something else. My waiting for the price to come down is analogous to waiting to find it second hand when I bought paper books. If the publisher never reduces the price, they'll never get my money, and I think that's a lost opportunity.

That sounds reasonable, but isn't. If ebook prices did drop to second-hand-pbook levels then the publishers would ruin the value of their ebooks. Then almost nobody would buy early, but everybody would wait for the price to drop to extremely low levels. Regular prices would drop since early buyers would assume that the value of a new ebook is only as much as a second hand paperback.

You are assuming that everything else would stay the same, but that they would just create some additional sales and (given the fact that production cost for each additional ebook is near zero) additional profits. However, this would only make sense many years after the original run. You cannot allow such super low prices to affect overall pricing.

[avantman42]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

That sounds reasonable, but isn't. If ebook prices did drop to second-hand-pbook levels then the publishers would ruin the value of their ebooks. Then almost nobody would buy early, but everybody would wait for the price to drop to extremely low levels. Regular prices would drop.

If that's true, then why didn't that happen with paper books? Why didn't everyone wait for the mass market paper back? I don't think I've ever bought a new hardback (I do have some that I bought second hand), but I have bought trade paper backs when I wanted the book badly enough that I didn't want to wait for the mass market paper back.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Regular prices would drop since early buyers would assume that the value of a new ebook is only as much as a second hand paperback.

You are assuming that everything else would stay the same, but that they would just create some additional sales and (given the fact that production cost for each additional ebook is near zero) additional profits. However, this would only make sense many years after the original run. You cannot allow such super low prices to affect overall pricing.

Those prices are already affecting sales, because a lot of ebook buyers are looking at the Agency 6, and saying, hmm, $13 for a single ebook, or $13 for four non-DRM'd Smashwords ebooks... even if three of them turn out to be a waste of time, I haven't lost any money. If two of them are good, I'm ahead; if I've gotten lucky and all four are good, I'm way ahead.

I am flat-out not a customer for Stephen King's new hardcovers. No decision the publisher makes is going to prevent my King hardcover purchases, which were, and will remain, $0. (I have limited space for books, and I prefer paperbacks for reading.) I *might* buy Stephen King ebooks... if they were offered without DRM, at a price comparable to what I can find them for in paper. Which is about half what's listed on the cover.

They have to do some research to figure out if low prices would gain enough buyers like me, to cover for the ones who would pay $13 but would just as quickly pay $3. Will they gain four new readers per current full-price buyer?

I don't know. For authors like King, maybe not; his books may have almost maxed out their market. But for lesser-known authors like Konrath--there's a reason his own books are selling so much better than the ones his publisher has the rights to. It's not that people are deciding, "hmf, I want HIM to get the money directly" when they go to make purchases; most Amazon buyers don't check those details. They see books by Konrath, whose books are high on the charts; they see one for $3 and one for $8.

I've seen no indication that publishers are even doing the market research to decide whether that trade-off in pricing could be effective. They seem to be thinking, "a book is WORTH $9, so we'll charge that much for it." Which is ridiculous.

At the moment, no novel is worth $9 to me. Some are worth $5. They seem to think that's an insulting offer. Do they want their books respected, or do they want them sold?

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by avantman42

If that's true, then why didn't that happen with paper books? Why didn't everyone wait for the mass market paper back? I don't think I've ever bought a new hardback (I do have some that I bought second hand), but I have bought trade paper backs when I wanted the book badly enough that I didn't want to wait for the mass market paper back.

A lot of people who buy hardbacks buy them because hardbacks look good on the book shelves. And some buy them to get the absolute first shot at reading a popular new book. There is a clear degradation in quality from hardback to paperback to mass market paperback. And mass market paperbacks don't appear until a year or so after the hardback. An ebook always stays the same.

Maybe I didn't make myself quite clear, a lot of people say that ebooks should be below 5 USD, for a bestseller that doesn't make sense (it might well after 2-3 years). A price at paperback levels does.

[HansTWN]

Elfwreck, you are, of course, right. My considerations apply to bestsellers. For lesser known authors very different rules apply.

[EowynCarter]

It's fine to charge whatever you want I suppose, but it's not fine to restrict access based on price. Meaning if someone wants to read your book they should be able to,

There are tons of things people can't afford. That's just the way it is.