5 ms·

WTF is... up with e-book pricing?

17 points by _grrr 16y ago

epynonymous 16y ago
agreed, ebooks are absurdly priced. on a related topic, i recently purchased an amazon kindle and was looking through the list of books that i had bought hardcovers for, shouldn't there be a discount from amazon or the book publisher? that would be instant revenue to allow purchasers of hardcopy books at a certain store to download the digital version at a heavily discounted (or free) rate.
- michael_dorfman 16y ago
  Why, exactly, are they absurdly priced? One would think that they, like all things, are in the process of being priced "correctly"-- that is to say, what the market will bear. Don't make the mistake of thinking that the production costs have should bear any relationship to the price. You don't price a Picasso based on the cost of the paint and canvas, do you?
  - pornel 16y ago
    The absurd is that you're paying for electronic delivery more than for physical goods. It's like getting JPEG of Picasso's painting for more than the canvas. I see price like this (naively perhaps): Paper book: author's revenue + publisher's revenue + printing + shipping e-book: author's revenue + publisher's revenue + 0 + ~0 From that POV e-book should always be cheaper than a paper book, and it has nothing to do with ripping off authors or publishers.
    - tripa 16y ago
      The JPEG analogy doesn't hold water. The JPEG is a lossy reproduction of the original painting. But following that path, the lossier reproduction of the author's ideas is not the e-book: it's still the paper one. (I still do agree with your naïve price model)
      - nagrom 16y ago
        Th JPG analogy does hold water - for a perfect ebook reproduction of the text, use a TIFF or bitmap or similar. However, often an ebook is a lossy reproduction - look at the reviews for Surface Detail on Amazon. The quality of the text is below that of the published books (there are sections missing, large gaps in the text, inappropriate hyphenation and missing chapter breaks), and the ebook is more expensive than the hardcover! It seems like the publishers are acting against their own best interests in the matter of ebooks, just like the music publishers acted against their own interests with music downloads. I agree with posters who claim that the books will be published eventually at market price; our problem is that the market is very slow to stabilise and we must suffer from inefficiencies in the market while it stabilises. The publishers seem to be the major reason for the slowness of the market and that's why people have a gripe with them.
        dagw 16y ago
        Th JPG analogy does hold water People buying a Picasso painting are paying for the scarcity of the physical artifact, not for the pretty picture. A more reasonable comparison would be to compare the price of a poster of a Picasso painting with a Tiff of a high enough resolution to reproduce that poster. And I'll bet you in that scenario the poster is cheaper.
        nagrom 16y ago
        And, just like the case of ebooks, few people think that it's worth buying the images. Instead they torrent them. The market is broken.
    - michael_dorfman 16y ago
      Again, you're making the mistake of thinking that costs like printing or shipping have anything to do with it. Saying an e-book should always be cheaper than a paper book is like saying that baseball tickets should always cost more than basketball tickets, because there are more players on the team. The price of paper and ink and shipping has almost nothing at all to do with the price of books. Do you really think that hardcovers are that much more expensive to produce than paperbacks?
  - davidw 16y ago
    > One would think that they, like all things, are in the process of being priced "correctly"-- that is to say, what the market will bear. I think that "in the process of" is critical. It hasn't yet stabilized. There are some genuinely weird things... for instance: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060555661?ie=UTF8&tag=dedasys-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0060555661 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060555661?ie=UTF8&tag=... the paperback is half the price of the Kindle version! I'm still not quite sure what I think about ebooks. Definitely convenient in some ways, but I like being able to hand a book I've read to my wife, or sell it used or whatever. Those things haven't quite been worked out, just yet. Also, there's something a bit monotonous about reading everything in the same "form factor" with the same fonts.
  - Tichy 16y ago
    It is absurd if I can get the same book as a paperback for less money - it is the same book, after all (essentially, digital information). Unless you are one of the rare people who has a huge advantage from just having the book electronically (like if you are traveling all the time), it just doesn't seem to make sense. The paperback is delivered for free, too - it takes longer, but as a reader, I have some patience (it takes time to read a book, too). If I like the paperback, I can pass it on to friends. Carrying books around is inconvenient, but I rarely read a book twice within a short time span, so I really only take one or two books when I travel. On the other hand I don't have to worry about leaving my book on my seat on the train when I go to the toilet. Moving and shelf space are an issue, on the other hand book shelves look good. Some people even buy fake book shelves with fake books to decorate places.
  - epynonymous 16y ago
    good points, but i think for me, the absurdity comes from the fact that there's no correlation between digital format and hardcopy. am i being taxed for the conversion process? i think amazon does a decent job for most of their ebooks are much less (up to 80%) less than the hardcopies, i'm sure in some ways it's promotional to get more kindle users, but at the same time it's also a better medium for them to sell books so the volume of books sold and the savings they achieve from not having any inventory allows them to price this competitively. plus, not to mention, a consumer must think of the total costs associated with purchasing digital content, the viewer, whether it be computer or device.
- _grrr 16y ago
  Although the cost of distribution of an e-book _is_ less than a paperback, the cost of making & distributing a paperback, or a hardback for that matter is not as much as people may think. Publishers sell some paperbacks for 99p & hardbacks for as little as £2, and still make a profit. Although agreed, an e-book should always cost the least. I still buy real books when they are for reference, usually hardbacks and not available on Kindle anyway, as the layout and ease of thumbing through is still unmatched by e-books, but I'll buy e-books for convenience when otherwise I might have bought a paperback.
loewenskind 16y ago
What's wrong with the pricing? I wish ebooks were cheaper, but honestly? I'd be willing to pay at least physical-book price because ebooks are more convenient in every way. They stream to all my devices so no matter where I am I can read if I want to. I have all my (e)books on my devices so they aren't taking up a wall or two in my house. I'm not a free market "true believer" [1], but pricing is based on what something's worth, not what it costs to produce. I agree with epynonymous though; it would be nice if I could get a discount for books I already own. On the other hand, I might just apply this discount myself by selling my physical ones and buying the ebook versions. [1] That is, I don't think it's the solution to every problem.
- arethuza 16y ago
  The main problem I have with ebooks is that a lot of the conversions are really shoddy bits of work - my Kindle copy of Surface Detail (by Iain M Banks) being the worst, lots of spaces missing between sections and inappropriate hyphenation.
- steve19 16y ago
  Have you looked at ebook pricing recently? Often they cost more than the paperback, and sometimes more than the hardcover.
  - loewenskind 16y ago
    If I don't already have the book I would pay more for it in ebook format (provided the conversion is good). It's handier for me.
- petercooper 16y ago
  pricing is based on what something's worth Right, and you can resell a physical book. It has additional value as an asset in itself rather than as a non-transferrable license.
  - thibaut_barrere 16y ago
    That's really my main pain point. Paying more, for something I cannot transmit to my son or friends, really is currently unacceptable for me.
steve19 16y ago
People would be very annoyed if suddenly paperbacks cost more than hardcovers. The situation with ebooks is worse. The ebook costs even less than a paperback to produce and distribute, and let sometimes cost more than the hardcover. I refuse on principle to pay more for a Kindle ebook than amazon is selling the hardcover. Edit: Just to clarify, I am happy to pay the same price as the paperback. Paying more than the paperback is what I refuse to do.
- tptacek 16y ago
  That's because the legacy book industry spent decades setting up a market segmentation regime that used hardcover books and the paperback release schedule as price discrimination tools. How is it any more rational to accept the paperback price for an e-book than it is to accept the hardcover price?
lt 16y ago
Charles Stross has a written an interesting piece about this in his blog: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/05/cmap-9-ebooks.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/05/cmap-9-e...
- arethuza 16y ago
  It's interesting that Charlie gets feedback saying "I don't care about formatting and design in ebooks!" - I've only started reading ebooks since I got an iPad and I can say that I do care about what they look like, particularly in factual books (I have some geology books) the handling of diagrams, footnotes and images is often terrible. Novels, at best, look shoddy.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    "It's interesting that Charlie gets feedback saying "I don't care about formatting and design in ebooks!" " I guess this is from the same people who watch a cam of a newly released movie with people walking by on the screen, from a 700mb divx, on a 15 inch screen, and who wonder why everybody doesn't do it this way, because I only waited for it to download for 4 hours, and yeah then I had to manually fix the synchronization of the subtitles (which I had to ask around on IRC for for half an hour before I found someone who had it), and oh I did have to install and download a couple of tools to decompress and fix and subtitle and play the movie, but dammit it was all worth it because I saved 5 bucks.
roel_v 16y ago
I think the market is learning the hard way that the physical aspects of paper/hardback books are marginal, and that a century of booking publishing had already set a correct price for books, and that subtracting the couple of cents it costs to actually print the book are being absorbed in the margin... It's a tough transition for customers to recognize value in intangibles when there is absolutely no physical aspect to hang on to any more (I mean I know it was for me, and I have a vested interest in it! Imagine how hard it is for others who just want cheap because they'll never gain directly from higher prices for digital goods. At least I get to take comfort in knowing that as prices (or rather, willingness to pay) for digital goods will go up, so will (partly) my income...)
- Tichy 16y ago
  Only that paper books are cheaper than ebooks. It seems unlikely that distribution of ebooks costs more, therefore your logic falls apart. If the correct price is the one that has evolved over a century, then the paper price is correct, not the ebook price.
  - nikgregory 16y ago
    Publishers are actually starting to format their ebooks, which yes will make it cost more than a paperback while ebooks remain a secondary release. Not only are formatters having to learn how to correctly format for multiple devices, but they're also having to deal with changeable formats and font sizes. So yes, its going to cost more when formatted properly over a read-as-is format where it only needs to be formatted properly to fit the page. ebooks if they were to be released like a book would only lose 20% of the face price of the book if companies like Amazon are willing to pass up the distributor costs and the publishers are truly not needing the publishing costs. However 40% of book prices belong to the retailer. Between 10-15% belong to the Author for writing the book. The remaining 25-30% belong to the publisher to pay all those pesky inconveniences like editors and proof readers, etc. that actually make books readable to millions and not wholly illiterate dribble. Assuming ebooks remain nothing but a parasite on the industry, you might assume a 10-20% discount off of face price unless the retailer offers discounts, which is what a lot of big booksellers do like Chapters/Indigo/Cole here in Canada.

17 points by _grrr 16y ago

agreed, ebooks are absurdly priced. on a related topic, i recently purchased an amazon kindle and was looking through the list of books that i had bought hardcovers for, shouldn't there be a discount from amazon or the book publisher? that would be instant revenue to allow purchasers of hardcopy books at a certain store to download the digital version at a heavily discounted (or free) rate.

michael_dorfman 16y ago
Why, exactly, are they absurdly priced? One would think that they, like all things, are in the process of being priced "correctly"-- that is to say, what the market will bear. Don't make the mistake of thinking that the production costs have should bear any relationship to the price. You don't price a Picasso based on the cost of the paint and canvas, do you?
- pornel 16y ago
  The absurd is that you're paying for electronic delivery more than for physical goods. It's like getting JPEG of Picasso's painting for more than the canvas. I see price like this (naively perhaps): Paper book: author's revenue + publisher's revenue + printing + shipping e-book: author's revenue + publisher's revenue + 0 + ~0 From that POV e-book should always be cheaper than a paper book, and it has nothing to do with ripping off authors or publishers.
  - tripa 16y ago
    The JPEG analogy doesn't hold water. The JPEG is a lossy reproduction of the original painting. But following that path, the lossier reproduction of the author's ideas is not the e-book: it's still the paper one. (I still do agree with your naïve price model)
    - nagrom 16y ago
      Th JPG analogy does hold water - for a perfect ebook reproduction of the text, use a TIFF or bitmap or similar. However, often an ebook is a lossy reproduction - look at the reviews for Surface Detail on Amazon. The quality of the text is below that of the published books (there are sections missing, large gaps in the text, inappropriate hyphenation and missing chapter breaks), and the ebook is more expensive than the hardcover! It seems like the publishers are acting against their own best interests in the matter of ebooks, just like the music publishers acted against their own interests with music downloads. I agree with posters who claim that the books will be published eventually at market price; our problem is that the market is very slow to stabilise and we must suffer from inefficiencies in the market while it stabilises. The publishers seem to be the major reason for the slowness of the market and that's why people have a gripe with them.
      - dagw 16y ago
        Th JPG analogy does hold water People buying a Picasso painting are paying for the scarcity of the physical artifact, not for the pretty picture. A more reasonable comparison would be to compare the price of a poster of a Picasso painting with a Tiff of a high enough resolution to reproduce that poster. And I'll bet you in that scenario the poster is cheaper.
        nagrom 16y ago
        And, just like the case of ebooks, few people think that it's worth buying the images. Instead they torrent them. The market is broken.
  - michael_dorfman 16y ago
    Again, you're making the mistake of thinking that costs like printing or shipping have anything to do with it. Saying an e-book should always be cheaper than a paper book is like saying that baseball tickets should always cost more than basketball tickets, because there are more players on the team. The price of paper and ink and shipping has almost nothing at all to do with the price of books. Do you really think that hardcovers are that much more expensive to produce than paperbacks?
- davidw 16y ago
  > One would think that they, like all things, are in the process of being priced "correctly"-- that is to say, what the market will bear. I think that "in the process of" is critical. It hasn't yet stabilized. There are some genuinely weird things... for instance: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060555661?ie=UTF8&tag=dedasys-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0060555661 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060555661?ie=UTF8&tag=... the paperback is half the price of the Kindle version! I'm still not quite sure what I think about ebooks. Definitely convenient in some ways, but I like being able to hand a book I've read to my wife, or sell it used or whatever. Those things haven't quite been worked out, just yet. Also, there's something a bit monotonous about reading everything in the same "form factor" with the same fonts.
- Tichy 16y ago
  It is absurd if I can get the same book as a paperback for less money - it is the same book, after all (essentially, digital information). Unless you are one of the rare people who has a huge advantage from just having the book electronically (like if you are traveling all the time), it just doesn't seem to make sense. The paperback is delivered for free, too - it takes longer, but as a reader, I have some patience (it takes time to read a book, too). If I like the paperback, I can pass it on to friends. Carrying books around is inconvenient, but I rarely read a book twice within a short time span, so I really only take one or two books when I travel. On the other hand I don't have to worry about leaving my book on my seat on the train when I go to the toilet. Moving and shelf space are an issue, on the other hand book shelves look good. Some people even buy fake book shelves with fake books to decorate places.
- epynonymous 16y ago
  good points, but i think for me, the absurdity comes from the fact that there's no correlation between digital format and hardcopy. am i being taxed for the conversion process? i think amazon does a decent job for most of their ebooks are much less (up to 80%) less than the hardcopies, i'm sure in some ways it's promotional to get more kindle users, but at the same time it's also a better medium for them to sell books so the volume of books sold and the savings they achieve from not having any inventory allows them to price this competitively. plus, not to mention, a consumer must think of the total costs associated with purchasing digital content, the viewer, whether it be computer or device.
_grrr 16y ago
Although the cost of distribution of an e-book _is_ less than a paperback, the cost of making & distributing a paperback, or a hardback for that matter is not as much as people may think. Publishers sell some paperbacks for 99p & hardbacks for as little as £2, and still make a profit. Although agreed, an e-book should always cost the least. I still buy real books when they are for reference, usually hardbacks and not available on Kindle anyway, as the layout and ease of thumbing through is still unmatched by e-books, but I'll buy e-books for convenience when otherwise I might have bought a paperback.

loewenskind 16y ago

What's wrong with the pricing? I wish ebooks were cheaper, but honestly? I'd be willing to pay at least physical-book price because ebooks are more convenient in every way. They stream to all my devices so no matter where I am I can read if I want to. I have all my (e)books on my devices so they aren't taking up a wall or two in my house. I'm not a free market "true believer" [1], but pricing is based on what something's worth, not what it costs to produce. I agree with epynonymous though; it would be nice if I could get a discount for books I already own. On the other hand, I might just apply this discount myself by selling my physical ones and buying the ebook versions. [1] That is, I don't think it's the solution to every problem.

arethuza 16y ago
The main problem I have with ebooks is that a lot of the conversions are really shoddy bits of work - my Kindle copy of Surface Detail (by Iain M Banks) being the worst, lots of spaces missing between sections and inappropriate hyphenation.
steve19 16y ago
Have you looked at ebook pricing recently? Often they cost more than the paperback, and sometimes more than the hardcover.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  If I don't already have the book I would pay more for it in ebook format (provided the conversion is good). It's handier for me.
petercooper 16y ago
pricing is based on what something's worth Right, and you can resell a physical book. It has additional value as an asset in itself rather than as a non-transferrable license.
- thibaut_barrere 16y ago
  That's really my main pain point. Paying more, for something I cannot transmit to my son or friends, really is currently unacceptable for me.

steve19 16y ago

People would be very annoyed if suddenly paperbacks cost more than hardcovers. The situation with ebooks is worse. The ebook costs even less than a paperback to produce and distribute, and let sometimes cost more than the hardcover. I refuse on principle to pay more for a Kindle ebook than amazon is selling the hardcover. Edit: Just to clarify, I am happy to pay the same price as the paperback. Paying more than the paperback is what I refuse to do.

tptacek 16y ago
That's because the legacy book industry spent decades setting up a market segmentation regime that used hardcover books and the paperback release schedule as price discrimination tools. How is it any more rational to accept the paperback price for an e-book than it is to accept the hardcover price?

lt 16y ago

Charles Stross has a written an interesting piece about this in his blog: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/05/cmap-9-ebooks.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/05/cmap-9-e...

arethuza 16y ago
It's interesting that Charlie gets feedback saying "I don't care about formatting and design in ebooks!" - I've only started reading ebooks since I got an iPad and I can say that I do care about what they look like, particularly in factual books (I have some geology books) the handling of diagrams, footnotes and images is often terrible. Novels, at best, look shoddy.
- roel_v 16y ago
  "It's interesting that Charlie gets feedback saying "I don't care about formatting and design in ebooks!" " I guess this is from the same people who watch a cam of a newly released movie with people walking by on the screen, from a 700mb divx, on a 15 inch screen, and who wonder why everybody doesn't do it this way, because I only waited for it to download for 4 hours, and yeah then I had to manually fix the synchronization of the subtitles (which I had to ask around on IRC for for half an hour before I found someone who had it), and oh I did have to install and download a couple of tools to decompress and fix and subtitle and play the movie, but dammit it was all worth it because I saved 5 bucks.

roel_v 16y ago

I think the market is learning the hard way that the physical aspects of paper/hardback books are marginal, and that a century of booking publishing had already set a correct price for books, and that subtracting the couple of cents it costs to actually print the book are being absorbed in the margin... It's a tough transition for customers to recognize value in intangibles when there is absolutely no physical aspect to hang on to any more (I mean I know it was for me, and I have a vested interest in it! Imagine how hard it is for others who just want cheap because they'll never gain directly from higher prices for digital goods. At least I get to take comfort in knowing that as prices (or rather, willingness to pay) for digital goods will go up, so will (partly) my income...)

Tichy 16y ago
Only that paper books are cheaper than ebooks. It seems unlikely that distribution of ebooks costs more, therefore your logic falls apart. If the correct price is the one that has evolved over a century, then the paper price is correct, not the ebook price.
- nikgregory 16y ago
  Publishers are actually starting to format their ebooks, which yes will make it cost more than a paperback while ebooks remain a secondary release. Not only are formatters having to learn how to correctly format for multiple devices, but they're also having to deal with changeable formats and font sizes. So yes, its going to cost more when formatted properly over a read-as-is format where it only needs to be formatted properly to fit the page. ebooks if they were to be released like a book would only lose 20% of the face price of the book if companies like Amazon are willing to pass up the distributor costs and the publishers are truly not needing the publishing costs. However 40% of book prices belong to the retailer. Between 10-15% belong to the Author for writing the book. The remaining 25-30% belong to the publisher to pay all those pesky inconveniences like editors and proof readers, etc. that actually make books readable to millions and not wholly illiterate dribble. Assuming ebooks remain nothing but a parasite on the industry, you might assume a 10-20% discount off of face price unless the retailer offers discounts, which is what a lot of big booksellers do like Chapters/Indigo/Cole here in Canada.