Are you prepared to pay the same price for an ebook as for the print book?

[Philippe D.]

I voted for the last option, but maybe my views are biased by my personal situation: being a relatively new convert to ebooks (16 months roughly), and also being someone who likes to re-read some books, I found myself buying ebook copies of books that I still have on shelves (mostly, hidden behind the much more numerous books that my wife reads - she's the heavy reader, she never re-reads a book, and she adamantly refuses to switch to ebooks). Paying twice for the same content, and moreover, paying the same amount for a second copy that has close to zero marginal cost, is difficult for me to accept.

Now, I also have a problem when buying ebooks: it's very difficult to judge quality before purchase. I am not talking about the litterary qualities, but more about the quality of the ebook conversion. Non-functional tables of contents, chapter heads that don't link to the table of contents, this kind of thing. Whenever I pay a high price (which, for me, is roughly 80%+ of the paperback price) for an ebook and realize I got a low quality conversion, I tend to get mad.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Philippe D.

Now, I also have a problem when buying ebooks: it's very difficult to judge quality before purchase. I am not talking about the litterary qualities, but more about the quality of the ebook conversion. Non-functional tables of contents, chapter heads that don't link to the table of contents, this kind of thing. Whenever I pay a high price (which, for me, is roughly 80%+ of the paperback price) for an ebook and realize I got a low quality conversion, I tend to get mad.

I'm not too worried about the quality of an e-book. Yes, bad formatting is annoying, but there are simply too many advantages to e-books (ability to change fonts and font-size, portability, no physical storage space needed etc. etc) to go back to paper. I usually fix the formatting myself, that's another thing you cannot do with paper books. I rarely bother with the table of contents, though. I don't use it much anyway while reading. If I need to look something up in a book, I use the search function (yet another point in favor of e-books, as you cannot search a paper book).

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Philippe D.

Whenever I pay a high price (which, for me, is roughly 80%+ of the paperback price) for an ebook and realize I got a low quality conversion, I tend to get mad.

I would return the ebook for a refund.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I would return the ebook for a refund.

Do all bookstores allow that? Amazon obviously do (one of the reasons I buy books there), but do Kobo, for example?

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Do all bookstores allow that? Amazon obviously do (one of the reasons I buy books there), but do Kobo, for example?

I don't know. I suppose I should have added "if possible".

I'd certainly have returned the Interzone rather than finished it if I could, but with Fictionwise having closed down some time ago, I rather doubt that B&N would have been willing to refund the money I paid Fictionwise 9 years ago!

[Philippe D.]

I have not bought any ebooks from Amazon, mostly Kobo and other distributors. I don't know about any refund policies, but I'd assume they tend to be limited in time, and I tend to buy ebooks some time before I read them - one of the good points of the e-reader is that it doesn't get heavier when containing more books.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Philippe D.

I have not bought any ebooks from Amazon, mostly Kobo and other distributors. I don't know about any refund policies, but I'd assume they tend to be limited in time, and I tend to buy ebooks some time before I read them - one of the good points of the e-reader is that it doesn't get heavier when containing more books.

Amazon allow 7 days for a refund on an ebook, so when I buy a book, a part of my workflow of transferring it into my Calibre library is to quickly glance through it using Calibre's viewer, and make sure there's nothing too obviously wrong with it. I'd only return a book, I think, if it was truncated, or something like that. Most cases of poor formatting I'd simply fix myself in Calibre's editor.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Do all bookstores allow that? Amazon obviously do (one of the reasons I buy books there), but do Kobo, for example?

Kobo have always offered a refund whenever I've reported a problem with a book I bought there.

(I haven't accepted a refund though, I prefer to fix the book myself so I can keep it and read it again in the future.)

[Sirtel]

Google Play allows refunds too. They have refunded a couple of epubs which could not be opened in ADE. That's an intermittent problem with Google epubs, ADE gives an error message with them. Not all Google epubs, of course, but occasionally it happens. They've always refunded them.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Google Play allows refunds too. They have refunded a couple of epubs which could not be opened in ADE. That's an intermittent problem with Google epubs, ADE gives an error message with them. Not all Google epubs, of course, but occasionally it happens. They've always refunded them.

This happened to me recently for the first time. The process was time-consuming and annoying, as CS kept insisting the problem was either at my end or with ADE, but a look at the ADE and Google forums shows it's a common experience. Once burnt, though; at least now I know and if/when it happens again, I'll go straight to refund and not waste my time looking for a non-existent fix. It's irritating in that if you burn up a promotional credit this way, you don't get it back.

[Lupin]

I Europe (EU) e-book costs more than paper book. Reason for this is that paper books are regarded as a books and they are taxed at lower levels in most countries. E-books on the other had, have been considered as a service, and the tax level has been higher. In Finland a paper books tax is 10% and e-books is 24%. So I pay more for an e-book. The cost is not the only thing to consider, my reasons are like Deskimases (https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...70&postcount=6), in addition my wife said some years a go "you must by no more books as we do not have the room for them". So I bought Bookeen Cybook Odyssey and rest is history. Now I'm on my third reader, Bookeen Cybook Muse HD. I seem to have knack for destroying these once in a while.

Now that there are Finnish e-books widely available from several bookstore (e.g. Adlibris, Elisa Kirja) it is easy to get new books. Elisa seem to be favoring watermarking e-books which I like as Adobe DRM causes endless trouble to Linux users.

I buy my English books usually from Kobo, occasionally from Safari (O'Reilly). Might sift to Elisa Kirja if they have a selection I like and after the EU new directive is in effect so that e-book costs the same or less than paper version.

[Little.Egret]

Originally Posted by Lupin

I Europe (EU) e-book costs more than paper book. Reason for this is that paper books are regarded as a books and they are taxed at lower levels in most countries. E-books on the other had, have been considered as a service, and the tax level has been higher. In Finland a paper books tax is 10% and e-books is 24%. So I pay more for an e-book. The cost is not the only thing to consider, my reasons are like Deskimases (https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...70&postcount=6), in addition my wife said some years a go "you must by no more books as we do not have the room for them". So I bought Bookeen Cybook Odyssey and rest is history. Now I'm on my third reader, Bookeen Cybook Muse HD. I seem to have knack for destroying these once in a while.

Now that there are Finnish e-books widely available from several bookstore (e.g. Adlibris, Elisa Kirja) it is easy to get new books. Elisa seem to be favoring watermarking e-books which I like as Adobe DRM causes endless trouble to Linux users.

I buy my English books usually from Kobo, occasionally from Safari (O'Reilly). Might sift to Elisa Kirja if they have a selection I like and after the EU new directive is in effect so that e-book costs the same or less than paper version.

Note that in UK, ebooks are taxed at 20% VAT/TVA and pbooks at 0% nevertheless ebooks are usually lower in price unless the pbook is new and being discounted. Also Kobo seem to inflate many prices compared with Amazon.

The new EU rules only allow the ebook VAT rate to be a reduced rate, they do not require this.

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by jhowell

I would pay more for an e-book than a paper book because it is of greater value to me.

How many people who expressed a similar sentiment would feel differently if they could not remove the DRM from the e-book?

We have all heard horror stories about people losing entire collections when a e-book "seller" (i.e., one that used DRM that wasn't broken at the time) shut down. It's unlikely that it would happen to a company as big as Amazon or Adobe, but it's also possible that they phase out support for old devices with new DRM.

For me, if I couldn't remove the DRM, the e-book would be worth far less than even the cheapest used book, as I would never know when my ability to access the book might be removed.

Even with easy DRM removal, e-books should be priced far less than physical books, because only the first copy costs very much to produce. If publishers ever wake to to the fact that much lower prices on zero marginal cost items results in far, far greater total profits, maybe this will happen.

But, as long as publishers live in the past where they keep suckering authors into signing contracts favorable to publishers (even though much of the reason—risk—for those contracts goes away with e-books), we'll never see e-books priced liked games or music. Even digitally delivered movies are cheaper per unit than e-books (less than $20/month for all you can watch, in many cases). Any industry that charges more than the thieves that run movie studios is truly ripping off the consumer, and publishers are doing just that with e-books.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by nabsltd

How many people who expressed a similar sentiment would feel differently if they could not remove the DRM from the e-book?

We have all heard horror stories about people losing entire collections when a e-book "seller" (i.e., one that used DRM that wasn't broken at the time) shut down. It's unlikely that it would happen to a company as big as Amazon or Adobe, but it's also possible that they phase out support for old devices with new DRM.

For me, if I couldn't remove the DRM, the e-book would be worth far less than even the cheapest used book, as I would never know when my ability to access the book might be removed.

Even with easy DRM removal, e-books should be priced far less than physical books, because only the first copy costs very much to produce. If publishers ever wake to to the fact that much lower prices on zero marginal cost items results in far, far greater total profits, maybe this will happen.

But, as long as publishers live in the past where they keep suckering authors into signing contracts favorable to publishers (even though much of the reason—risk—for those contracts goes away with e-books), we'll never see e-books priced liked games or music. Even digitally delivered movies are cheaper per unit than e-books (less than $20/month for all you can watch, in many cases). Any industry that charges more than the thieves that run movie studios is truly ripping off the consumer, and publishers are doing just that with e-books.

As to your first question, yes I would have the same sentiment.

As to your last part, instead of saying publishers are living in the past, perhaps you should be telling the buyers to quit buying ebooks at those prices.
Here is the thing: if I am selling something at $20 and have people willing to pay it, I really don't care if the one that wants it for $2 doesn't buy it. No, I am not going to reduce my price because the one thinks a person's time is worth nothing.
Yes, I was actually told that by a couple of people. You aren't "working" so you can make me "8 hours time project" for your costs only. Cleaned up answer was No, you either pay me what I am asking or you don't get project."
Plain and simple: you think a price is too high, don't buy it. Vote with your wallet.
No one is making you buy a certain anything. There are other choices.

Note: I am probably the cheapest person on this forum. If I don't like a price, I don't buy it.

[darryl]

I'm going to take a moment here to again have a look at the results. As at the time of posting, about 33% of people would pay the same or more than for a print book, or actually buy the print book instead. The other roughly 67% would not. An overwhelming 81% of this latter group, comprising almost 56% of those responding, would at least consider buying the ebook later when the price comes down. I suspect, however, that virtually all of this 67% would at least consider a later purchase at a cheaper price. Because of my badly worded questions, some who said they would read something else may well also consider buying the ebook when the price later comes down. I suspect there are actually very few who would rule out later buying the ebook altogether, and probably the only ones who would categorically do so would be ideologically driven.

The unknown here is of course just how many sales a publisher actually loses forever because of initial high pricing. If these figures are broadly accurate then, as a poster pointed out earlier, a publisher has little to lose by initially pricing high. Unless a very large percentage of sales would in fact be permanently lost, which seems unlikely.

In the longer term, of course, there may be other considerations. Traditional publishing, as some commentators have suggested, may be well advised to price their books competitively for new authors and at least some mid-listers even initially. The blockbuster authors may garner significant sales at a higher price against Indies, but I suspect in the longer term there will be only one market. And traditional publishing will have to give authors a far more equitable share, as some of the smaller more innovative ones are already doing.