The abysmal pricing of ebooks...

[cstross]

Originally Posted by Xenophon

Have you considered trying to sell them non-exclusive eRights? That would at least let you sell the ebook somewhere else, too. Alternatively, have you considered selling to Baen, who at least get it?

Yes to both. We (my agent and I) tried to do the non-exclusive thing on our last contract round: they made a deal-breaker of the exclusive rights. I've considered selling to Baen ... but I'm not prepared to take the 50% pay cut it would entail. (Moving publisher is pretty damned serious -- it's the equivalent of changing your day job. And under some circumstances it can involve the equivalent of losing seniority, as well as angling for a promotion.) For the time being, I just have to grit my teeth and keep nudging in the right direction. And I'm not the only author in that position.

(There's other stuff going on that I can't write about in public. If you run into me at an SF convention, join me for a beer and I'll talk about it instead )

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by cstross

Yes to both. We (my agent and I) tried to do the non-exclusive thing on our last contract round: they made a deal-breaker of the exclusive rights. I've considered selling to Baen ... but I'm not prepared to take the 50% pay cut it would entail. (Moving publisher is pretty damned serious -- it's the equivalent of changing your day job. And under some circumstances it can involve the equivalent of losing seniority, as well as angling for a promotion.) For the time being, I just have to grit my teeth and keep nudging in the right direction. And I'm not the only author in that position.

(There's other stuff going on that I can't write about in public. If you run into me at an SF convention, join me for a beer and I'll talk about it instead )

I presume that the "50% pay cut" is in terms of the advance, not in terms of "total long-term royalties." Right? I don't think that there's any reason to expect your books to sell worse over time via a different publisher.

On the other hand, a 50% smaller advance is a big, big, BIG deal. It socks you both in terms of the time value of the money and in terms of certainty of income. That's a really really hard problem to wrestle with. And if Tor will eventually get it w.r.t. eBooks, there'd be no (MobileRead-related) reason to make the switch.

I sure hope that Tor does wind up with reasonable eBook policies. After all, who in the publishing industry wouldn't want to bring in the equivalent of their hard-cover revenues without negative impact on existing revenue from paper sales? And, as a reader, I want to be able to buy reasonably-priced DRM-free, multi-format eBooks.

Xenophon

P.S. I'm all too familiar with pay cuts as a result of job changes. I took a 6x pay cut to go back to grad school for my Ph.D. Now that I'm done, my salary as a post-doc goes up by a factor of three -- all the way back to 50% of what I made in industry... 10 years ago! I can't wait to get back to a real job...

[bwaldron]

Originally Posted by Xenophon

I sure hope that Tor does wind up with reasonable eBook policies. After all, who in the publishing industry wouldn't want to bring in the equivalent of their hard-cover revenues without negative impact on existing revenue from paper sales? And, as a reader, I want to be able to buy reasonably-priced DRM-free, multi-format eBooks.

Amen to that.

[Redcard]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Huh? Standard cover price for Mass Market PBs is $5.99 to $8.99 (the average being $7.99), occasionally there will be one for $9.99 (never seen one higher than $9.99 and I do a lot of book buying). Anything higher puts the pricing in the range of Trade Paperbacks which are a different animal.

Actually, he's kind of right.

A lot of publishers now are not running MMPB's for "newer" stuff, instead opting to go PB at $12 to $15. For the few books that hit it big, they go MMPB , but most of them I've seen are from $9.99 to $11.99.

Every single author on my "list" who is releasing a MMPB this year is at $9.99.

A few are at $11.99 for MMPB.

[AnemicOak]

Wow, I've never seen that & I buy probably 100 MMPB's a year (or did until I got my Sony, although I still check prices). I've seen the $9.99 ones, but those have been the "deluxe" MMPB's that are taller than regular ones.

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Wow, I've never seen that & I buy probably 100 MMPB's a year (or did until I got my Sony, although I still check prices). I've seen the $9.99 ones, but those have been the "deluxe" MMPB's that are taller than regular ones.

My wife usually picks up the latest books in the Star Trek collections. These usually have prices more the 9.99 if I remember correctly. Unless she gets them at Walmart. Then again, I am getting "old".

BOb

[cstross]

Here's the thing about mass market paperbacks: in the USA (not in the UK -- at least, not since 1991) they're sold on much the same basis as magazines. Shops buy them and pay the publisher for the number of books they bought at wholesale price, put them in the racks for a couple of months, then remove them and return them to the publisher for a refund in full. However, rather than ship gazillions of paperbacks about, they merely strip off the covers and return those (which saves a lot of money -- returned MMPBs are unlikely to sell and the publisher will be left paying a refund and warehousing costs out of pocket). The stripped books are then pulped.

Trade paperbacks and hardbacks are not sale or return items, and are not stripped/pulped if they don't sell -- they can be returned for a refund but will end up back in the warehouse and going out again until they're sold.

Obviously these models are grotesquely inappropriate for ebook sales -- but as I noted earlier, the big publishers aren't nimble enough to re-organize their internal business structure to adapt to the new market. As it is, they see ebooks as just a funny new-fangled distribution channel for an electronic equivalent of the dead-tree editions they're used to shipping -- treating the ebook market any differently might actually require someone to think about things, and That Would Never Do.

[b0rsuk]

So, it looks like we can't count on existing publishers to drop the prices, right ? The way I see it we have to wait for startups.

[Spellbot 5000]

Looks that way. As long as ebooks remain a small niche product that really doesn't affect the bottom line either way, they won't see any reason to lower prices on them to remain competitive.

It'll happen eventually, but I don't think we'll see the explosion in interest and low rates like we saw with MP3's. Sad fact is, most people don't read. If the majority of the mainstream public don't read cheap paperbacks on a regular basis, they certainly won't pay for an ereader even if the cost came way down.

[Justy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Bookshops in the UK tend to merely replace the "$" with a "£" when it comes to setting prices .

In Canada they keep the "$" but add 5-20% to the amount, even though the Cdn $ and US $ have been almost identical for quite some time. I am always happy to spend $5.99 US for an ebook instead of $9.99 Cdn for the same book in paperback.

[astra]

Originally Posted by b0rsuk

So, it looks like we can't count on existing publishers to drop the prices, right ? The way I see it we have to wait for startups.

We can if we, for example, don't buy ebooks that are more expensive than $10.
I don't.

[b0rsuk]

Originally Posted by astra

We can if we, for example, don't buy ebooks that are more expensive than $10.
I don't.

That might give them an excuse to say "See ? There's no demand for ebooks." and continue doing nothing.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by b0rsuk

That might give them an excuse to say "See ? There's no demand for ebooks." and continue doing nothing.

true. we should all write to them regularly and complain (politely) about the prices instead, and explain they are the reason we're not buying ebooks.

[Prospect]

IMHO the best way of reducing ebook prices in the long term would be to buy as many and as pricy books as possible. The publishing houses will not be enthusiastic participants in the ebook revolution if they are constantly nagged by stingy ebook customers arguing that an ebook is something less than a paper book and should therefore subsequently cost less.

Prices will not go down before the marked mechanisms dictate them to do so. And these mechanisms will not come into play before the ebook business gain some momentum and volume.

Given the current and future cost of the liseuses, such volume will not come from the cost-conscious who uses the e-book as a cheap substitute for paper, but from people who have realized (as we all have ) that e is superior to p - no matter the cost.

[astra]

Originally Posted by b0rsuk

That might give them an excuse to say "See ? There's no demand for ebooks." and continue doing nothing.

Then they will loose. Whether they like it or not we are moving towards digital books, it is just a matter of time. So if they want to say "see?", they will be out of business.