Unlocking the Gates of Alexandria: DRM, Competition and Access to E-Books

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by conan50

Resell would not be an issue if they did not charge as much or more for some ebooks from major publishers. It costs them less to produce an ebook, yet they charge as much or more than print books, and you have no options to resell or pass the ebook on to someone else.

Few ebooks (in the UK, at least) cost as much as their paper equivalent. I buy a great many ebooks, and generally pay somewhere between half and two thirds of the price of the paper book, which seems fair to me.

[Purple Lady]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Few ebooks (in the UK, at least) cost as much as their paper equivalent. I buy a great many ebooks, and generally pay somewhere between half and two thirds of the price of the paper book, which seems fair to me.

I've seen you make this comment before and it really surpised me. In the US this is not normally the case especially under agency pricing. I don't remember what books I checked before, but a lot were priced as high or higher than the cheapest available paper version. The same books on the UK were cheaper.

Edit: cheaper than the corresponding paper version in the UK. I would consider two thirds the price to be a bargain, and half the price incredible.

[AnemicOak]

I'd guess a lot depends on specific books and or publishers.


For the heck of it I checked a book (a Fantasy novel) on both Amazon sites...

Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erickson
US paperback - $6.58
US eBook - $8.99
UK paperback - £6.29
UK eBook - £5.98

So in that case the UK eBook is cheaper than paper, but not by much.

Unless one is going by the "list price" of the print book, then the eBook in the UK is 33% cheaper.

[shalym]

Originally Posted by Purple Lady

I've seen you make this comment before and it really surpised me. In the US this is not normally the case especially under agency pricing. I don't remember what books I checked before, but a lot were priced as high or higher than the cheapest available paper version. The same books on the UK were cheaper.

Edit: cheaper than the corresponding paper version in the UK. I would consider two thirds the price to be a bargain, and half the price incredible.

I've seen it both ways. That being said, here's an example of a Kindle book that costs more than any new paper version of the same book:
http://www.amazon.com/Moving-Picture...dp/B000UVBT3G/

Shari

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

I'd guess a lot depends on specific books and or publishers.


For the heck of it I checked a book (a Fantasy novel) on both Amazon sites...

Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erickson
US paperback - $6.58
US eBook - $8.99
UK paperback - £6.29
UK eBook - £5.98

So in that case the UK eBook is cheaper than paper, but not by much.

Unless one is going by the "list price" of the print book, then the eBook in the UK is 33% cheaper.

A book I actually bought: "Murder on the Orient Express".

Paperback list price: £7.99
Amazon paperback price: £5.99
Kindle price: £3.99

Thus, the Kindle price is 66% of Amazon's paperback price, and 50% of the list price. This is typical of the books I buy. Of course there's the odd one that's proportionally more expensive, but there are also many that are dramatically cheaper, too. Eg a couple of weeks ago I bought the first 7 books in Winston Graham's "Poldark" series for 99p each in a "Kindle Daily Deal" sale; the paperbacks cost, on average, £5.59 each.

I really do think that ebooks are, on the whole, very reasonably priced.

[DiapDealer]

I rarely run across ebooks that aren't less than their cheapest available (new) paper equivalent in the US.

[ballfresno]

Originally Posted by MikeB1972

<Rant>
If ebooks and pbooks need to be the same then hand me the paperback I can change and re-size the font on and we will go from there.
</Rant>

Funnily enough, just this morning I found myself pressing down on a word in a pbook, expecting the dictionary to pop-up...

[Purple Lady]

The Girl With All the Gifts
Kindle - $9.99
paperback - $8.42 Amazon, $3.59 + $3.99 shipping from UK

The Remaining: Extinction
Kindle - $8.99
Paperback - $6.43 Amazon

I seem to find these constantly.

[soulfuldog]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Few ebooks (in the UK, at least) cost as much as their paper equivalent. I buy a great many ebooks, and generally pay somewhere between half and two thirds of the price of the paper book, which seems fair to me.

It must depends on the authors because that's not what I find. Quite often the ebook is a little cheaper, but its pennies, only rarely is it significantly cheaper (on the increasingly rare occasion it features in the daily deal). The standard pricing for many books I look at seem to be set at £3.66 for Kindle & £3.85 for the paperback.

Just taking a random selection from the first page of the Best Sellers on Amazon:

The Girl on the Train
£5.70 - Kindle
£6.00 (Hardcover - paperback isn't released yet)

I Let You Go
£3.99 - Kindle
£3.85 - Paperback

To Kill A Mockingbird
£3.29 - Kindle
£3.85 - Paperback


Us
£4.99 - Kindle
£3.85 - Paperback

The Husband's Secret
£3.61 - Kindle
£3.80 - Paperback

[conan50]

In the last few months of 2014 Amazon signed new contracts with several major US trade publishers. Those contracts included provisions for agency priced ebooks. This both raised the prices of ebooks published by S&S, Macmillan, and Hachette and blocked retailers from discounting.

We saw the obvious result in January: consumers switched to other formats and other segments of the industry (ones not tracked by the AAP).

How much would you bet that the trend in declining ebook revenues will continue?

I'm expecting the decline to continue in February and to get a lot worse when we get the figures for April and May 2015; those will reflect Harper Collins' new agency ebook contract.

http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/0...-january-2015/

Amazon being forced to follow/agree with publisher pricing has not helped ebook costs. I've noticed new releases significantly higher than in years past.
The good news about e-books is that self-published and small published works are often much lower priced and often free of DRM. My hope is that in the long term traditional publishers are crushed under the weight of the flood of low cost self-published ebooks coming into the market. Arguably they are not as good as some traditionally published ebooks, but the onus is on traditional publishers. Is that traditionally published book of fiction 10 times better than that popular self-published work of fiction? It had better be, because it costs you 10 times as much.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by conan50

My hope is that in the long term traditional publishers are crushed under the weight of the flood of low cost self-published ebooks coming into the market. Arguably they are not as good as some traditionally published ebooks, but the onus is on traditional publishers. Is that traditionally published book of fiction 10 times better than that popular self-published work of fiction? It had better be, because it costs you 10 times as much.

I don't know that the lower-priced indies are exerting THAT much pressure, to tell the truth. I don't NOT read indies. But I usually only read ones that have already garnered a lot of attention. That's not because I think "indies suck." It's because I want to spend more time reading than I do sampling/vetting. I don't need publishers to tell me which books are worthy, but I do need someone (whose opinions I've come to trust) to do so—trad-pubbed or indie.

I'm "all in" on new ereleases priced at $12-14. I don't suspect I'm even remotely alone there. I would think things would have already collapsed if I was.

It's not price that makes me take a chance on authors I don't know anything about. Sometimes I just gamble—no matter the table stakes.

The "ebooks should be dirt cheap" tribe are fairly vocal--I'll give them that. I just don't think there's as many of them out there as certain ebook forums and comments sections would lead/want one to believe. We'll see in the long run, I guess. I don't think I'll lose either way, though (unless someone deletes all the good books out there before I get to them).

[conan50]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I don't know that the lower-priced indies are exerting THAT much pressure, to tell the truth. I don't NOT read indies. But I usually only read ones that have already garnered a lot of attention. That's not because I think "indies suck." It's because I want to spend more time reading than I do sampling/vetting. I don't need publishers to tell me which books are worthy, but I do need someone (whose opinions I've come to trust) to do so—trad-pubbed or indie.

I'm "all in" on new ereleases priced at $12-14. I don't suspect I'm even remotely alone there. I would think things would have already collapsed if I was.

It's not price that makes me take a chance on authors I don't know anything about. Sometimes I just gamble—no matter the table stakes.

The "ebooks should be dirt cheap" tribe are fairly vocal--I'll give them that. I just don't think there's as many of them out there as certain ebook forums and comments sections would lead/want one to believe. We'll see in the long run, I guess. I don't think I'll lose either way, though (unless someone deletes all the good books out there before I get to them).

Some interesting charts about Indies here:
http://authorearnings.com/report/jan...rnings-report/

I have tended not to read Indies much, but have been pleasantly surprised by a few, and intend to read more of them. Bookbub and Gorilla are great for getting suggestions/offers from quite a few indies.

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by conan50

[snip]

Is that traditionally published book of fiction 10 times better than that popular self-published work of fiction? It had better be, because it costs you 10 times as much.

I'm assuming "10" is an exaggeration.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by conan50

I have tended not to read Indies much, but have been pleasantly surprised by a few, and intend to read more of them.

Same here.
I just don't think there's enough "I'll read anything as long as it's cheap" readers out there for indies to put all that much pressure on traditional publishers to drastically lower their prices.

I think indies are definitely going to change the publishing game in the long run, but I believe most of those changes will come in the way of contract terms/lengths and royalty rates between authors and publishers—rather than average retail ebook prices for consumers.

[Barcey]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Same here.
I just don't think there's enough "I'll read anything as long as it's cheap" readers out there for indies to put all that much pressure on traditional publishers to drastically lower their prices.

I think indies are definitely going to change the publishing game in the long run, but I believe most of those changes will come in the way of contract terms/lengths and royalty rates between authors and publishers—rather than average retail ebook prices for consumers.

I don't know, I occassionally browse the Kobo top 50 ebooks of the day list and I've been seeing it primarily populated with ebooks in the Indie price range with just a couple of the traditional publisher priced ebooks. People aren't necessarily shopping for Indie authors but they're trying new authors at a price range they're comfortable with.