How do you plan to wait out the coming ebook shakedown?

[ProfCrash]

Originally Posted by bobavey

At the risk of sounding vain, give some of us independent authors a try. It doesn’t have to be me. I realize there is a lot of trash out there, but there are many very good independent authors, too. Our books are generally much cheaper, and you can sample the books for free before you buy.

I normally only buy indie authors who have come highly recommended by friends or posters whose opinion I greatly respect. I have to admit that 90% of what I have tried gave me a good understanding of why the author was an independent author.

I know, you can't generalize, but I sure found some really, really bad indie authors. The good news for me is that their books were free so I didn't feel bad about stopping in the middle and removing them from my Kindle.

I really need to check out the book recommendation area here...

[JackNolte]

Well, I actually think the smart indy authors aren't going to make that obvious. And then there are those of us who publish under other names with the big presses. Most studies have shown that readers don't care who publishes a book -- they just care about quality. So I'm not sure why you'd have to draw attention to whether it's a small press, big press, co-op, or self-published. Just let the work stand for itself. That's the beauty of what's happening now -- no more gatekeepers. Readers get to decide.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by ProfCrash

I normally only buy indie authors who have come highly recommended by friends or posters whose opinion I greatly respect. I have to admit that 90% of what I have tried gave me a good understanding of why the author was an independent author.

I know, you can't generalize, but I sure found some really, really bad indie authors.

Look around and you'll find a lot of equally bad books from the BPHs.
It's called Sturgeon's law: "90% of everything is crap."
No reason why indie books should be better or worse than the BPH-vetted one. Cause for every deluded wanna-be Hemingway self-published junker (that's the stereotype, right?) out there there is an equally-bad 3-chapter bait and switch rush job (the other stereotype) out there.

Ultimately, the BPHs and their Publisher's Association stooges are swimming against a tide of consumerism. Consumers are now in control and no amount of pronouncements and legal mumbo-jumbo is going to change the fact that the vast majority of buyers *know* they don't have to take it meekly. For every buyer who shrugs off price increases and irrational policies, there's easily a dozen who will grumble and take their business elsewhere; to the small and medium publishers, the genre houses who know which side their bread is buttered on, and yes, the self-published independents. And those are the honest readers. The others...

The BPH execs may chortle at their short-term profit boost in absolute revenue but it is coming at the expense of market share. For now, the overall market is growing as ebooks phase in and a lot of people are filling out their ebook libraries. This phase will not last forever. Eventually the pbook business is going to level off and start to decline. And when that happen, ebook market share is going to be the telling discriminator as to who prospers and who wanes.

In the meantime, those of us who take our business elsewhere may not individually amount to much in the BPH's eyes (a few hundred or thousand bucks each at most) but multiply it by even a few thousand or a few hundred thousand and it'll start to add up.

As the old-time Congressman said: "A million bucks here, a million bucks there, pretty soon it adds up to real money..."

[Fbone]

I don't mind using the library and do so almost exclusively. I feel I'm getting something in return for the property taxes I pay. With the huge selection via inter-library loans I don't feel limited in any way.

Problem I have with indie authors and publishers is they get lost in the mix. The better ones especially as they are fewer. Searching through 16,381 books on Smashwords is torture.

[ProfCrash]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Look around and you'll find a lot of equally bad books from the BPHs.
It's called Sturgeon's law: "90% of everything is crap."
No reason why indie books should be better or worse than the BPH-vetted one. Cause for every deluded wanna-be Hemingway self-published junker (that's the stereotype, right?) out there there is an equally-bad 3-chapter bait and switch rush job (the other stereotype) out there.

I fully agree. I happen to know which mainstream press authors I really like and buy those books. Then I buy books recommended by friends and family and on awards lists. It is rare that I just decide to try a random new author. I guess my indy experience has been more in the later try a new random author and it has not been the best experience.

I did not worry about getting Jim Butcher's Changes when it was released because I am getting bored with Harry Dresden but I would have been pissed if First Lord's Fury had been delayed. I might have had to learn how to strip DRM and convert a file....

[DTM]

As long as books have DRM, nobody is really buying them, just renting them. Now, I pay $1.50 to rent a movie. If the publishers want to start charging $1.50 for their "rental" books, I'll be interested. (I'm serious. Come up with a temporary unlock so I have only 30 days before the book re-locks and I'll be happy to rent it for $1.50.)

In the meantime, if it's public domain, I get it at Gutenberg for free.

If not, I get it at the library for free. (Well, "no additional charge".)

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by ProfCrash

I know, you can't generalize, but I sure found some really, really bad indie authors. The good news for me is that their books were free so I didn't feel bad about stopping in the middle and removing them from my Kindle.

I really need to check out the book recommendation area here...

I start with some ground rules for myself.
Any spelling or grammatical errors that I notice in the description = don't bother downloading. I'll sometimes tolerate errors in mainstream books' descriptions--but those weren't written by the author. The blurb is the first sample of the author's writing; if s/he can't fails to make that appeal to me, I'm not going to try the book, no matter how compelling the premise.

Under 15,000 words: No more than $3.
Up to 50,000 words: up to $5.
More than 50k words: Up to $7. And mostly, only up to $5; I won't buy an unknown-to-me author for $7.

More than $7: not for leisure reading. If I find interesting nonfic that costs more, I'll consider it. (I'll buy gaming PDFs that cost more than that.)

Software-contingent DRM: Nope. No purchase. No downloading freebies. (Social DRM like watermarks in PDFs, I'm prone to stripping before converting to however I'm going to actually read them.)

For books at Smashwords, I read the HTML sample on the site. (No sample = no purchase.) If the first few pages don't interest me, I skip it. If the sample shuts off before I decide, I skip it. (WTF is with 15% samples of 9000-word short stories? What, afraid people are going to read half the story and decide they don't care how it ended?)

[tammycravit]

I guess I'm a lot less absolute in my approach to this problem than some. For me, the rule is simply that I'm willing to pay what I feel the book is worth, and not more than that. I know this is a fuzzy, mushy rule, but that's what best matches my reading needs.

There are a handful of authors for whom I would previously have been willing to shell out the bucks for a hardback, and I'd probably pay a like amount for their books in digital format. For most other authors, I'm willing to spend around what their books cost in paperback, plus or minus a bit. ($10.00 or so isn't all that out of bounds for an e-book, in my view.) On the other hand, one of the books I depend on for my work (freelance paralegal) is an annual $125.00 purchase in paperback, and I'd happily shell out that much for a searchable Kindle edition that obviates the need for me to cart around 5 pounds of dead trees. (In fact, I suggested that to the publisher (LexisNexis) in a detailed e-mail about why e-books would be a win/win for them. They didn't respond to my e-mail, but that's no surprise.) But there are definitely legal e-books I've bought that were worth more than $9.99 to me, and I had no qualms about spending the money on them.

[M0zza]

I've just decided to knock buying on the head altogether for the time being. Especially as I've just moved to Australia and I'm not sure I can get my ebooks from the UK anymore.

There are plenty of books on this website worth reading, so I'll stick to those for the time being and see how things pan out.

I think we have several years of companies buying up/selling off ebook rights for older works and rejigs in contracts before the georestrictions get sorted. And hopefully in that time we will see the publishers go from kicking and screaming about piracy to making the books affordable and removing DRM as the music industry did.

I'm surprised that this site hasn't dipped it's toe in the ebook publishing arena. There are a lot of authors on here and an awful lot of avid readers.

[MV64]

I'm a bit of a conspiracy theorist about this. I think they're trying to kill e-books. They're gouging people who want to start reading ebooks who will pay the price. But it won't be too many after a while and within two years or so we'll see headlines about how e-books died before they really truly began, and the companies will go back to selling overpriced paper books.

[GA Russell]

I got my first eBook reader last Christmas so it's been ten months. In that time, there has not been something new to come out that I want to spend over ten dollars for.

I'm not against it in principle. If I want to read a book and the paper version is the same price as the eBook, I'll buy the paper because I think that that is a better value.

But for the most part, I'm just not interested in what the BHPs are now putting out, at any price.

[L.J. Sellers]

The publishing industry is driving out writers and alienating readers and will eventually come to its senses. In the meantime, there are far more great books under $10 than I can ever find time to read. As a writer, I'm not waiting out anything out either. My novels are priced at $2.99 (with the first book at $.99), and readers are enthusiastic.
L.J.

[Skydog]

Originally Posted by abookreader

I think that in my case "Agency Pricing" has done nothing except make me uber-price conscious about the cost of a book. Pre-Digital reading/Agency Pricing I would have bought Vince Flynn's American Assassin on one of my Wal Mart runs and pretty much just paid the price without a whole lot of thought.

Now -- I see that $14.99 price or maybe it is down to $12.99 and I put my foot down. Yeah, I know it is extremely comparative to what I would have paid in hb prices before, but the whole DRM, Price Fixing, Geographic Restrictions and all the other crap the Publishers have pulled over the past year has just angered me to the point where I deliberately refuse to buy some books. It isn't so much the price, it is the culmination of the negative feelings I have toward some of those large Publishers that I just refuse to play their games now.

I'm sure I'll read Vince Flynn's book someday. But I'll do it on my terms. Its not like I haven't been reading since his book was released. I'm just reading other books instead of his.

Ditto to all the above!

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by foghat

Seems like I am the anomaly on this, but I don't worry about paying more for an ebook than the paper version.

You're not the only one. I'll buy a book if I want it, if I can afford the price. I probably won't even know how expensive the paper version is. Besides, the publishers themselves are better at preventing me from spending my money than I ever could, by simply saying I can't buy the book.

[mldavis2]

Value .... differs with each of us, of course.

Hardbacks are intended to be either re-read or displayed -- coffee tables, bookcases, etc. They can be passed from one generation to the next. When I consider purchasing a hardback, it's under those considerations -- never to just get a new release before my neighbor reads it first. I can wait for fiction.

Paperbacks are cheap -- paper which yellows with age, and bindings which are often simply glued with materials that harden and crack with age. They are throwaways in the sense that you don't buy one to keep it for 20 years and re-read. You take them to the library or swap with a friend.

eBooks are also cheap, but they are in danger of obsolescence. If I buy an eBook from Amazon or B&N, it will have DRM 'protection'. If my Kindle breaks or becomes obsolete, my books are 'gone' unless I break the law and find a way to remove the DRM so I can re-visit that book on another reader. I must 'legally' trust Amazon/B&N to continue to allow me to 'un-archive' the book I paid for and download it to my next reading platform. I can 'loan' the book to another person if they have a compatible reader and for a limited time period, unlike a pBook which has no platform restriction and no time limit.

So, ultimately, an eBook is not as potentially 'valuable' as a physical copy aside from its 'read-once' capability. There is risk of obsolescence, and restrictions not common to pBooks. So even if the content is the same, the value of the media is not equal, even for paperbacks with limited shelf life.

I refuse to pay the same for an eBook that I pay for a pBook. There is no paper cost, no printing cost, no transportation cost, no bricks-and-mortar display cost -- only a web page and the same editing work. The profit to the author is (or should be) the same or greater than a paper copy that adds to the overhead. The bottom line for me is that there is no book for which I cannot wait for a competitive eBook price, no mystery or best seller or autobiography that 'must' be read this week and not next month or next year that is worth paying a premium for. Let's not rush to pay for services that we are not getting -- paying for the cost of materials that we are not receiving.

Yes, brick and mortar stores are in big trouble. As eReaders become as ubiquitous as cell phones, fewer people will stroll through bookstores to seek new material. Display copies for your coffee table and bookshelf will still be sold, but the mass market for paperback novels will shrivel and many stores will die, I suspect. But let's face reality and refuse to pay for the salary of a fireman on a diesel locomotive.