"If you can afford an ebook reader, you can afford ebook prices"

[wigm]

I can afford to buy an ebook reader and I can choose not to buy an ebook, instead I'll buy the used print copy for 1/4 or less the price and the publisher gets nothing from me, then I can GIVE the book to somebody or put it on a table during my upcoming spring cleaning and sell it for 25 cents and they still get nothing....

[Scott Nielsen]

Originally Posted by charleski

The notes made by Mike Shatzkin are a far better representation of what Cader was saying than the gobbledegook from the Consumerist.

Thought this deserved a bump. Very interesting piece - much more so than what the Consumerist put out - as were the comments (and replies) entries.

[KunoK]

I don't think it is relevant, what I can afford. I could by 7 readers and still not be willing to give 15$ for a book. Assuming I can afford it, it is relevant what I choose.

I am not sure if ebooks matters yet, but if they become more widespread, publishers will need to adapt to customers willingness. My guess is that you can charge a high price when a book is new and a lower price when it is not. Publishers seems to live in yesterdays world. Those who are able to adapt will survive, the rest will die.

[Ken Maltby]

Originally Posted by KunoK

I don't think it is relevant, what I can afford. I could by 7 readers and still not be willing to give 15$ for a book. Assuming I can afford it, it is relevant what I choose.

I am not sure if ebooks matters yet, but if they become more widespread, publishers will need to adapt to customers willingness. My guess is that you can charge a high price when a book is new and a lower price when it is not. Publishers seems to live in yesterdays world. Those who are able to adapt will survive, the rest will die.

Unless they are "Too big to fail", then we are stuck with them.

Actually I think it might be that some bureaucrat or politician well decide
they can convince the public that some publishers are "Too Important to
fail" and must be propped up by the Government/State. ( Can you say
N.Y. Times? Or the "Fairness Doctrine") Not a good thing, IMHO

Luck;
Ken

[brecklundin]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

Or conversely, it could be said that once you bought an ebook reader, you no longer can afford ebook prices because your money went to the reader.

PRICELESS!! That deserves a note in the MR Hall of Fame!! Not just because it's clever, but because for many people it's true.

Niiiice....

[dmaul1114]

Originally Posted by KunoK

I don't think it is relevant, what I can afford. I could by 7 readers and still not be willing to give 15$ for a book. Assuming I can afford it, it is relevant what I choose.

Yep.

It's a question of value and what a person is willing to pay for an item, not a question of whether the item is affordable.

They can try to raise e-book prices, sales will tell them whether the prices they want are prices the market will tolerate or not.

[Worldwalker]

I am not well-off. My ebook reader was a major purchase for me. I bought it specifically because I love classic books (currently reading Allan Pinkerton's books on his experiences as a detective), many of which aren't available on dead trees at all, and those that are, in addition to the expense, would further burden my groaning bookshelves. What I want to read changes with my mood and situation; I used to carry several books with me to have a choice; now I just carry my ebooks. When it comes to printed books, I wait for the mass market paperback, and even then, I wait for sales (in fact, I got my 505 on sale) or use coupons. No, just because I own an ebook reader does not mean that I can afford inflated prices for ebooks; it means that I have hundreds of dollars less in my book-buying budget than I had before.

Yet the publishing industry wants me to pay the full, undiscounted and undiscountable hardcover list price for a book that I'll be reading on a postcard-sized screen, probably with formatting issues. It's a book that I can't lend to my mother, or sell to the used book store when I'm done, or even donate to the library book sale. In short, as so many people have mentioned above, they want me to pay more and get less.

With an ebook, the publisher has no printing costs. They have no distribution costs. They have no returns and remainders. They have no loss and damage. As a result, their profit on an ebook is an order of magnitude higher than that of a paper book, and with zero risk to them besides. No worries about the size of the print run; the supply always meets the demand. Yet they want to charge as much -- or more! -- for something that costs them a fraction as much, and carries infinitely less risk, and demand that they, not the retailer, have the authority to set that retailer's prices.

I suspect that one of the biggest things holding back wider adoption of ebook reading devices is not the lack of color (few general reading books are anything but black and white), nor the time to turn a page (it's a lot less intrusive, and a lot faster, than doing it physically!) -- in short, none of the things that "the industry", whoever it may be, blames. No, the biggest barrier to reader sales is the price of books. People don't buy ebook readers because they'll pay more to get less, above and beyond the price of the reader itself.

Anyone here remember laser discs? The kind the size of a record album? The ones that cost upwards of a hundred dollars each, and needed a thousand-dollar-plus player? Not very many people bought them. Now consider DVDs. You can buy a DVD player for twenty bucks on sale. The average new release movie sells for fifteen or twenty bucks, and if you wait a while, you can get it on sale for ten. Plus there's the Wal-Mart bargain bin, used DVD stores, package deals of all sorts ... and how many DVDs does the average person own? I have hundreds. I've spent far more on DVDs than I ever did on laserdiscs (which was, um, zero) and therefore Hollywood has made a lot more money from me.

If the publishing industry gets a clue, they'll realize the future of ebooks is in volume. If the market will buy, say, ten ebooks at $1 profit each, or 1 ebook at $10 profit, it makes sense for the publisher to set their price for the $1 profit because -- aside from the benefit to society -- the cheaper ebooks will encourage people to buy ebook readers, and therefore increase the publisher's market even further. Next year, all those people who saw their friends reading cheap ebooks might have readers of their own, and suddenly the publisher will be selling 20 books where they sold 10 before. And it doesn't cost them any more to produce 20 ebooks than it does 10, or 1.

It's not worth trying to push the benefit to society angle on major publishers. Like most corporations, they see everything as a zero-sum game. If something helps their customers, or everyone, or anyone, it must hurt them in some way. So (with a few exceptions, like Baen) they'll see a benefit to society as a point against doing something, rather than in favor of it.

Oh, speaking of Baen, the Baen Free Library is the worst thing that ever happened to my book-buying budget. It's the literary equivalent of a drug dealer giving out free samples. As if I wasn't buying enough from them already, that blasted thing got me hooked on several more series ... and I've ended up buying dead-trees copies of books that I already had as ebooks, after buying the later ones on paper, because I'm kind of OCD about sets of things.

Kind of funny, isn't it? The company that's trying to keep their prices as high as possible, and give the least value for the customer's money they possibly can, and will undoubtedly send their corporate nazgul after anyone caught reading their books without paying, has gotten exactly $0 from me. I just don't buy (or read) books I can't afford. The company that gives me free books, on the other hand, has probably gotten more of my business, at least in per-unit sales, than any of their competitors (probably not in raw dollars, because one technical reference can cost me as much as a dozen MM paperbacks, and I have to buy those, but certainly for my pleasure reading). They give me samples, they have paper books at reasonable prices and DRM-free ebooks even cheaper if I prefer that format, or if the book isn't available on paper. It's not even a matter of "well, they're nice people so I'll buy from them" -- it's a good business decision for me to buy books from them because they give me a better deal than their competitors.

The publishing industry is trying to solve the wrong problem. They're trying to solve the problem of "how do we get the maximum profit from each ebook we sell?" and "how do we prevent ebook sales from cannibalizing hardcover sales?" The real question they should be asking is "How can we get the maximum profit from this particular book?" ... and the answer to that question is more likely to be "sell it as an ebook, cheap, so a zillion people buy it" than "try to restrict the market and jack up the price".

[mrscoach]

Well said, Worldwalker. Karma your way

[Pardoz]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

The publishing industry is trying to solve the wrong problem. They're trying to solve the problem of "how do we get the maximum profit from each ebook we sell?" and "how do we prevent ebook sales from cannibalizing hardcover sales?" The real question they should be asking is "How can we get the maximum profit from this particular book?" ... and the answer to that question is more likely to be "sell it as an ebook, cheap, so a zillion people buy it" than "try to restrict the market and jack up the price".

That sums it up pretty neatly, yes. Problem is, the people making the decisions are pretty heavily invested in a failed model, so they're unlikely to change their tunes.

[TallMomof2]

This is the same as saying if you can afford an expensive bookcase then you can afford to pay full retail for hardback books. Sure, I purchased very nice custom stained birdseye maple bookshelves (no oak for me since oak releases a gas that causes objects, especially lead, to deteriorate faster) with doors for my books and collectibles but that's because I want furniture that I won't have to replace in my lifetime and can hand it down to the kids.

My ebook reading device is for convenience. I was reading on PDAs and PCs long before dedicated devices became mainstream. The number one reason I purchased an eInk reader was to read outside in bright light. When the kids were younger we spent many hours at the swimming pool and the playground and reading off a PDA didn't work too well. We still spend a lot of time at the pool in the summer and my Kindle (in a ziplock bag) is a great reader.

[Blue Tyson]

And, of course there is this:-

If you can afford a hardback book, you can afford to pay Australian prices for all your hardbacks. $50.00 a book or more. So why don't they raise the prices by a factor of 2 on all those?

[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by Over

I can, but I won't.

Because I've bought an ereader, I can't affort expensive ebooks. :P

I refuse to spend more than 10$. And more than paperback/mass market paperback price.

I've only bought about 4 books above 10$. I prefer to wait 'til the price drops or even buing the physical book if the price won't budge.

In my opinion 10 is an entirely arbitrary limit (it may make sense because of our love for decimal figures). My rule of thumb would be something like:
Price for paperback minus X%.
X could be variable: Small or even "0" shortly after initial release. Getting bigger over time. Ending somewhere in the range of 20%.

[Hellmark]

My ebook reader was a major purchase for me. I had some money that came in from a workers compensation settlement (work accident messed up my right arm), and otherwise I'd not have been able to afford it (I make only minimum wage currently). Others I know with ebook readers got them under similar circumstances, where they came into money via a tax refund or something they ordinarily do not have, and now have to "feed" it without that extra money. Publishers fail to see this presumably substantial portion of the ebook market. Hell, look at the people who read on their iPhones or other similar devices, and ebooks are a casual purchase. They're not the type that would pay hardback prices.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by Pardoz

That sums it up pretty neatly, yes. Problem is, the people making the decisions are pretty heavily invested in a failed model, so they're unlikely to change their tunes.

End of the day, the book industry isn't going to be massively impacted if a couple of the major book companies crash and burn - it's in a better position than films, games or even music in that respect.

So my response is "ah well".

[radamo]

Originally Posted by Pardoz

That sums it up pretty neatly, yes. Problem is, the people making the decisions are pretty heavily invested in a failed model, so they're unlikely to change their tunes.

Could not have said it better. This is one of the key points that I take out of this pricing quagmire.
RA