Joe Abercrombie on Ebook Pricing

[AshW]

I've been waiting for his books to come out for a while. And while they weren't priced higher and usual (for the uk) I thought it was interesting to see a (relatively) high profile author have in interest in this kind of stuff and obviously unhappy with the current situation.

http://www.joeabercrombie.com/2009/0...-exciting.html

Pleased to note that Best Served Cold, and the First Law Trilogy, are now available on e-book via Waterstones.com:

The Blade Itself
Before They Are Hanged
Last Argument of Kings
Best Served Cold

The prices are a tad disappointing - £10 and change for Best Served Cold when a hardback is selling at £8.50, and around £6 for the First Law books when mass-market paperbacks are available for a mere £4.

My own feeling about e-piracy and so forth is that it's virtually impossible to put a stop to - the more popular you are the more torrents will endlessly spring up, and most of them in places where folks don't respond to a polite email. The only effective way to combat it is to provide people with a higher quality service than pirates do, more easily available and at a price that seems reasonable. Then I think most will be happy to pay.

One problem is that a lot of users somehow think that e-books, since they don't have to be printed, are pure profit for the publisher and should therefore be virtually free whereas, of course, the great majority of the costs that go into making a paper book (commissioning, editing, artwork, marketing, repping, promoting and, erm, paying the author) still apply with an ebook. Champions of a revolutionary future of free-love filesharing where writers and readers will all be liberated from the shackles of publishers tend to forget the vital role they play as gatekeepers and ensurers of a certain level of quality (you may think some books that are published are rubbish but believe me, until you've seen a slush pile you really have no idea).

Even so, selling ebooks at more than the cost of the paper books is going to look just a wee bit like taking the piss to some buyers, I suspect. I'd like to see them retail at most at the same price as the paper equivalents, and ideally somewhat lower. At the moment most publishers and booksellers are still focused on the paper market where heavy discounts are applying more and more widely, making ebooks something of a speciality item and hence relatively more expensive. Hopefully in due course that will change, and I'll certainly be pressing them to lower the price as soon and as much as possible but, hey, it's a start.

[Falbe Publishing]

Since I first considered ebook pricing a few years ago, I always thought it was reasonable for an ebook to be priced below a mass market paperback, at least for fiction.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Falbe Publishing

Since I first considered ebook pricing a few years ago, I always thought it was reasonable for an ebook to be priced below a mass market paperback, at least for fiction.

England is a special case I think. They charge a tax VAT on eBooks but not on books so if the publisher has the same price the net results will be that the eBook is higher.

Dale

[pdurrant]

Even in the UK I think there are sufficient savings with ebooks that the ebook price should be no higher than the cheapest paper version, even allowing for the VAT difference.

Originally Posted by DaleDe

England is a special case I think. They charge a tax VAT on eBooks but not on books so if the publisher has the same price the net results will be that the eBook is higher.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

England is a special case I think. They charge a tax VAT on eBooks but not on books so if the publisher has the same price the net results will be that the eBook is higher.

Dale

It applies to the whole of the EU, due to what's called the "eCommerce Directive", which rules that all "digital data" has to be charged at the full rate of VAT. It was originally enacted to ensure that VAT was charged on music downloads, but eBooks got "caught" by it too.

[dmikov]

I like how pandits of high ebook prices manipulate true facts to cover other true facts. Zigfrid and Roy can take a lesson.
Oh, don't you worry about saving on paper, shipping costs and such it's not major cost.
A. Even if it's true for first print books, what about second etc prints. When I will have ability to buy Tolkien electronically, what am I paying for? Certainly not for editorial work or marketing. It has been done decades ago and has been recovered aplenty. Or R. Heilein - You still paying advances to dead author?- really? It's print cost - plain and simple, will I see e-book prices reflecting this? I don't think so.
Funny the other day I looked at who Mark Twaine called "pirates" - it was publishers. He felt, they are the ones ripping authors.

B. There are cost savings small or large - I want to see them in the price tag.

Sad part, that publishers lies are lapped greedily by too many otherwise intelligent people.

[HarryT]

I suggest that you do your bit to "fight the good fight", then, and upload some nicely formatted books here for people to enjoy free of charge, so that they can avoid those nasty publishers.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by dmikov

I like how pandits of high ebook prices manipulate true facts to cover other true facts. Zigfrid and Roy can take a lesson.
Oh, don't you worry about saving on paper, shipping costs and such it's not major cost.
A. Even if it's true for first print books, what about second etc prints. When I will have ability to buy Tolkien electronically, what am I paying for? Certainly not for editorial work or marketing. It has been done decades ago and has been recovered aplenty. Or R. Heilein - You still paying advances to dead author?- really? It's print cost - plain and simple, will I see e-book prices reflecting this? I don't think so.
Funny the other day I looked at who Mark Twaine called "pirates" - it was publishers. He felt, they are the ones ripping authors.

B. There are cost savings small or large - I want to see them in the price tag.

Sad part, that publishers lies are lapped greedily by too many otherwise intelligent people.

Heinlein's wife still needs the money. She put together a great copy of Strangers in a strange land that goes beyond the '60s printing using her husbands notes. The print costs are less than a buck. But none of that stuff you talk about has electronic copies already so these need to be created and converted to the various formats for sale. There still are expenses in buy tools, labor, proof reading, computers, etc. Yes there is still a profit for the author and publisher. Why else would they do it.

Dale

[dmikov]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Heinlein's wife still needs the money. She put together a great copy of Strangers in a strange land that goes beyond the '60s printing using her husbands notes.

That relates to ebooks costing less or more how? Just because a greedy wife wants to make more by sticking bits of a notes into a great novel it makes the price go up on all Heinlein books or something? In fact for me it's not even a value add, but dillution, but my opinion on this practice is irrelevant.

Originally Posted by DaleDe

The print costs are less than a buck. But none of that stuff you talk about has electronic copies already so these need to be created and converted to the various formats for sale. There still are expenses in buy tools, labor, proof reading, computers, etc. Yes there is still a profit for the author and publisher. Why else would they do it.
Dale

Really? That includes what ink and paper? In many posts here and in the media, the printing costs include labor, shipping, storage and returns. I think it comes way higher then a buck.

Again the point is not free editions, but the costs. There are still expenses, but don't make me laugh about converting books to various formats for sale, what you don't know how to convert any book from say xml or html in 2 seconds or less?
Computers, labor, tools yeah they will add up if you doing one book. But as project Guttenberg and Darknet shows it's not that much.

One dedicated person can scan and proofread one book in less then a week (full time). That's what for college student who can read ~ $500-$600, so it's $1 cost if you sell only 500 books, you probably want to do it for the books that sells 1K, so it's 50c cost per.
And that's with proofreading, do Google type scanning and it takes what 2 hours?

But I don't think I will ever convince you. Different reality outside of what publishers PR feeds you doesn't seem to ever make a difference for certain types of posters.

[AshW]

And yet a ticket to Transformers 2 costs the same as a ticket to The Hangover. Pricing, across all forms of media is rarely proportional to cost, it tends to be more market driven.

I too think ebooks are currently too expensive (especially in the UK due to the VAT issue already mentioned), but it's a debate with a lot of dimensions to it. Cost of production is only one of them.

[doreenjoy]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Heinlein's wife still needs the money. She put together a great copy of Strangers in a strange land that goes beyond the '60s printing using her husbands notes. The print costs are less than a buck. But none of that stuff you talk about has electronic copies already so these need to be created and converted to the various formats for sale. There still are expenses in buy tools, labor, proof reading, computers, etc. Yes there is still a profit for the author and publisher. Why else would they do it.

Dale

Hear, hear.

Also sites like BoB and FW invest huge amounts of money in their web sites (though FW hardly looks like it). The storage and ecommerce capabilities constantly need upgraded. A print pub invests next to nothing in web technology.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It applies to the whole of the EU, due to what's called the "eCommerce Directive", which rules that all "digital data" has to be charged at the full rate of VAT. It was originally enacted to ensure that VAT was charged on music downloads, but eBooks got "caught" by it too.

Yes but most of the EU also charges VAT on books, except the UK. So the comparison is still valid.

Dale

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Yes but most of the EU also charges VAT on books, except the UK. So the comparison is still valid.

Dale

Technically, the UK also charges VAT on books, but at 0% (yes, I know that's a silly thing to say, but there is a legal difference between something being "exempt" from VAT, and being "zero rated" for VAT). In most - perhaps all - EU countries, books are either zero rated, or rated at a lower rate than the standard VAT rate. Eg, in France, the standard rate of VAT is 19.6%, but books are only charged (I believe) 5%.

[Jellby]

In Spain I think the normal VAT is 16%, but only 4% for books.

[EowynCarter]

The only effective way to combat it is to provide people with a higher quality service than pirates do, more easily available and at a price that seems reasonable.

Ahmen to that !
If only some would realize that...