How much do you pay for fiction ebooks?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by CommonReader

Those are extremely low average prices that are being quoted here. Do you really get recent books by major authors at such low prices?
I find it quite difficult to get anything - fiction and non fiction - for less than 7 €, and that includes both German and English ebooks. I was quite happy to get Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror" (hardly a very recent work) for just 2 € at Kobo, that price has shot up to an unbelievable 10,34 € again right now.

Most of the full-price books I buy cost between £4-5 (€6-7), but I also buy Baen's monthly ebook bundle every month (4 new books for $18), and I take full advantage of Amazon UK's "Kindle Daily Deal", from which I generally buy several books a week at 99p each. (eg today I bought 4 books: a fantasy trilogy, and a non-fiction book about the conquest of Annapurna.)

[Yapyap]

I don't have an absolute set maximum. It depends on the book.

There is one current series where I'll pay whatever it takes to get the next book the moment it's available (indeed, a couple of years ago when Kobo had the then-newest book out a week before release date, I cancelled my Amazon $13.99 pre-order and got it on Kobo for around $17), and a few others where I'll go to $9.99-$12.99.

I do price comparisons even for those, though, and unless some shop sells the book early, I'll get it where it's cheaper / if possible, use a coupon.

Anything else...

Well, with my TBR list as long as it is now, and now that I'm not bothered by country-hopping any longer and do it for price as well as to bypass restrictions (honestly, for a long while I felt uneasy about doing it for price reasons - but then I figured that if publishers are okay with offering excellent deals for their major markets in countries where people earn much more, I'll be damned if I sit here with my $11-$15 average price per any book, with no deals ever, because at those prices, I really couldn't afford to buy as much as I read), I generally don't go above $4.99 for most books I'm somewhat-but-actively interested in or above $2.99 for the "ooh, never heard of this before but it sounds possibly interesting / hmm, not really my current genre, but I've switched genres before when I get tired of something, and it's highly praised, so I can just as well get it".

[Katsunami]

What I want to pay depends heavily on the book itself, but I must say that buying ebooks has greatly spoiled me. In the Netherlands, an English paperback version of a normal 400 page book will cost somewhere between €7.99 and €11.99 ($10.79 to $16.19), depending on the age of the book and the "greatness" of the author.

When buying ebooks, I can often pay half the price of a paperback, which will bring down the price of the more expensive books to €5.99 ($8.09.) When shopping around among different EPUB stores, it's not uncommon that I can find the same book for a price of "Euro == Dollar", making the book cost €4.45 ($5.99).

So, €4.45 / $5.99 is the highest price I often pay for new, somewhat high-profile (fantasy) books. Sometimes the price is $6.99. Most of the time the price will be reduced to less because of some sort of coupon or sale.

Some books have to be very cheap for me to buy them. For example, Forgotten Realms fantasy released by Wizards of the Coast. WotC is the Harlequin of Fantasy: you can keep reading all your life long without ever reading anything else. If I can't get FR books very cheap (under €2.95 / $3.99 or even less), then I don't want them, except maybe for some very particular specials.

Other books can be quite expensive. For example, I bought Yoshikawa's "Taiko" and "Musashi" in the 50% Kobo sale a few weeks ago, and they would normally be $15.99 (€11.84) a piece. The sale cut the prices in half, but even without a sale, I would have bought them, because these are books 1200+ pages long, they're classics, and they're personal favorites, not to mention that they normally can't be bought outside the US.

That last statement does mean that I will jump geo-restrictions to lower the price of a book further, or to buy a book that I cannot normally buy.

There you have it; the price I'm willing to pay for a book is quite broad, depending on the book itself. In any case, I'm saving huge amounts of money buying ebooks as compared to buying paperbacks, not to mention saving enormous amounts of space and waiting time for shipment.

That said, the library is useless for me. Only the very high-profile bestsellers are in English in Dutch libraries; other books are either translated, or not there at all. If there would be a way to borrow ebooks from an English library from the Netherlands, I would shift all my "nice to read, don't need to have"-reading to library books. All but a few of the Forgotten Realms books would be an instant candidate for such a shift.

[susan_cassidy]

Normally, I won't pay over $9.99 for an ebook. I once paid $12.99, I think, for a book that I really, really wanted to read right then. I normally put books higher than $9.99 in my ereaderiq price drop list, until they drop to $8.99 or so. Often, they come down in price fairly quickly, or at least when the paperback comes out. There are a bunch of old Nero Wolfe books that are still too expensive for what I want to pay, though. $9.99 for a 40 or 50 year old book is a bit much, I think.

[BelleZora]

I often pay full price for the latest books of authors I really love. I justify it by my gratitude that they are writing books I enjoy so much. I shop around or use Kobo coupons for MR book club selections, but have paid full price several times. The latest releases of most authors I like go on my watch list until the price drops or the book comes to my local library. My book budget balances out with public domain, promotional freebies, and sale books, as well as those from the library, that I read. To adhere to a maximum price is too restricting for me, but I own more than enough books to usually wait for sales.

I love to read so much that I don't begrudge paying any fair price.

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by CommonReader

Those are extremely low average prices that are being quoted here. Do you really get recent books by major authors at such low prices?

Quick answer: No.

I often read four or five books a week, and while some of them do come from major authors, many of them do not. I keep my costs down by reading a lot of indies, freebies, discount, and backlist books.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by susan_cassidy

There are a bunch of old Nero Wolfe books that are still too expensive for what I want to pay, though. $9.99 for a 40 or 50 year old book is a bit much, I think.

I would rather read a Nero Wolfe book than many others. They are timeless IMO. But the majority I have read I have borrowed from the library in one form or other.

But age does not reflect quality for me. My parents spent far more than they could afford on books by Dickens for example and they were pretty old even then.

Since getting an ereader 3 years+ ago I have rarely read a book that was published recently. Nothing against them, and I am not waiting for the to age or anything. Just that there are so many books that I have wanted to read or would have wanted to read if I was aware of their existence, Rex Stout books being a prime example. I was actually euphoric when I found that there were some I had not read. My mouth may have actually started to water

If I see a book that looks like I would like it, I will often check for prior works by that author, series or not, but especially if they are a series. I could have done this earlier but for most of my life I was limited by what the stores or libraries carried. Old habits die hard. Reading a book out of sequence does not upset or bother me, but as I generally have the choice now I prefer to start at the beginning and carry on to the end eventually.

That said, yesterday I started a book published last year and I expect I will finish it today and feel no regrets.

Helen

[shanghaichica]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Why do you steal from authors? Don't you think that people who write books deserve to be paid for their work? You won't make any friends in these parts by telling people that you're a thief.

I agree. I think authors should be rewarded for their work. I've come across many people on internet forums who seem to have the idea that ebooks as apposed to physical books should cost nothing or next to nothing because of their format and this is something that I disagree with.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by shanghaichica

I agree. I think authors should be rewarded for their work. I've come across many people on internet forums who seem to have the idea that ebooks as apposed to physical books should cost nothing or next to nothing because of their format and this is something that I disagree with.

That's not only the case for ebooks. There are many people who think like: "If it's digital, it should be free. If it's not free, it can and will be pirated."

One can see it with games. I can find many GOG.com games as Torrents or on newsgroups. Many of those games only cost $5, and GOG.com often has discounts up to 80%. I wouldn't even take the trouble to go and search for a pirated version. (GOG.com does have more expensive games, like $9.99 for all-time classics, or up to $19.99 for some GOG-exclusive Indie releases.)

Piracy for phone apps is actually thriving, even though many of these apps often cost less than $1...

[samhy]

My limit is 5€, with some exceptions (for instance, two Stephen King books that were between 5€ and 7€).

[CommonReader]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Most of the full-price books I buy cost between £4-5 (€6-7), but I also buy Baen's monthly ebook bundle every month (4 new books for $18), and I take full advantage of Amazon UK's "Kindle Daily Deal", from which I generally buy several books a week at 99p each. (eg today I bought 4 books: a fantasy trilogy, and a non-fiction book about the conquest of Annapurna.)

Thanks. Baen seems to have a very specialized selection though. Apparently there is no way to get around Amazon if you want to get cheap English language books on the Continent, thanks to their residence in a tax haven and their elimination of competiting companies (bookdepository). Waterstones locked out all buyers outside the UK and Ireland even before they sold out to Amazon.

[Atunah]

Originally Posted by CommonReader

Those are extremely low average prices that are being quoted here. Do you really get recent books by major authors at such low prices?

I do. I mean it depends on the sales. Many books I read only come out in paperback or maybe trade paper, so when agency was in place the ebook would be 7.99 like the paperback when they came out. After that agency thingamachingy a lot of the publishers dropped the prices on the new stuff even. So the pb was still 7.99 and the ebook was 6.59 for example. Other publishers went straight for the $4.99 price for the ebooks. HarperCollins is good for that. I got a series of books that just came out or maybe a couple of weeks for $1.99 on sale.
I am sure a lot of that has to do with genres too and I buy pretty much all my books from Amazon.

But I don't just read new releases, I still have a lot of back list to read too. So snap up on sale I do.

[pidgeon92]

I keep my Amazon ebook wishlist on ereaderiq.com. When I get an email that a book is below $4.99, I'll generally buy it. I picked up Ender's Game for $2.90 last week. I've gotten a lot picker on price now that I (a) have a huge backlog of ebooks I've purchased over the years, and (b) have such a good ebook selection from the local public library.

[AnemicOak]

I have not real set limit as to what I'll pay for a fiction book it's totally dependent on the particular book and how much I want it when I go looking. If it's more than I want to pay I don't buy it and just read something else and either forget about the first book or add it to my watch list at eReaderiq so that I get an email when the price drops. I'l also check the library when I think about it, but often the library doesn't have the book or the wait list is huge so it's not always someplace I think to check anymore.

I have so many books I've bought with coupons or on sale waiting to be read that there are only a handful I spend more than $5-$6 on over the course of a year.

[derangedhermit]

Originally Posted by pidgeon92

I keep my Amazon ebook wishlist on ereaderiq.com. When I get an email that a book is below $4.99, I'll generally buy it.

I would like a similar service, except epub/non-Kindle. Does anyone here know of such a thing?

I have a list on B&N that I would buy at $5, but manually checking for sales on specific books I want to buy is a waste of time.