Put another way, if the market is willing to sustain the price (and sales figures suggest it is), why not charge $9.99 for a ebook?
They don't really know what volume they would do at a radically lower cost, because they haven't tried...and the reason they haven't tried is that they're terrified of cannibalizing print sales.
(Some individual authors, on the other hand, have tried cheaper prices, bypassing the publishers, and reported significantly enhanced revenue compared to a publishing contract.)
Also, I specified an open, non-DRM format because that way I could apply software to the problem: text summarization tools, staged memory training, and/or just copying sections out manually into summary documents.
So if they would drop their prices to 1/10th you wouldn't spend a penny more but you'd have more books? It's obvious how this is good for you, but how is that an advantage to them? They're trying to make money, not populate the world with books.
Further, you have a finite list of books you want. Even though it's growing it's not growing at the speed of light. If they let you get everything on your list for the 1/10th the price then they soon won't have anything else to sell you. Where are they going to recoup the money they lost buy letting you have 10 times the assets for the same cost?
What's more, chances are good that I'd spend more money. Aside from the expense, what keeps me from buying more books is the sheer physical space they occupy. If I could get electronic versions of them all, in formats that let me back them up, copy excerpts from them, etc., then that would cease to be an issue. But a restrictive DRM-encumbered file gives me less utility than a paper book, so I've been unwilling to spend as much money for it.
Gain for you, no gain for them.
>it's unlikely that they'll run out of things to sell me.
I find this hard to believe. Currently it sounds like you spend up to your max periodically. If every buying cycle you were able to completely empty your list, it's hard to imagine that there would never be a time that that list wouldn't be less then your max budgeted about, as it is now.
>What's more, chances are good that I'd spend more money.
No they're not. You've already explained that you're already spending all that you're comfortable spending. There is virtually no chance that you'd spend more. As I explained, it's much more likely you'd spend less.
>But a restrictive DRM-encumbered file gives me less utility than a paper book, so I've been unwilling to spend as much money for it.
What do you want to do that you can't? It will sync to at least 3 devices (I only have 3 applicable devices, so I don't know if I could push it to more). You can't loan it to people, that's true. You also can't copy it around as a file, but I don't see how that's a meaningful restriction.
Unless I break the DRM, I'm tied to the vendor. I have no guarantee that I'll still be able to read the book in 20 years, or read my margin notes. If I'm less fond of the book, I can't sell it when I'm done with it, or give it to a library.
Finally, I think the public benefit of getting more books in more people's hands shouldn't be discounted, given that the Constitution says the whole purpose of copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts."
I had no problem paying $9.99 for books on my kindle, but most of them are $12.99 now and I just feel like that's too much. In some cases, buying the physical hardcover is actually cheaper than $12.99 too, and that's what REALLY pisses some people off. The physical nature of the product surely is at least $1 - $2 of the actual cost of the the book, so buying it digitally gets rid of this cost.
Also, many books are destroyed if they're not sold (hence the "if you bought this book without a cover" warning in the front of many books). By moving to digital, the publishers no longer have to eat these costs.
So basically, eBook pricing is complete bullshit.
Just like private repositories are a service that brings value that people are willing to pay for, so is having an entire book in a small and portable format.
Ignore the costs related to making and distributing the physical objects when it comes to pricing them; if that's accepted wisdom for start-ups, why wouldn't it be for established companies?
So the Agency pricing scheme is only changing the pocket where money goes.
And keep in mind that in countries like China, the same books cost usually $3, after translating rights, printing, distribution and publishers costs. And publishers still live on this, in a country where people buy much less books.
So what is fucked up is that someone is making money, and it doesn't even benefit the authors.
It's more or less the same problem as in music.
Irrelevant. Pricing is based on value provided, not cost to create.
>and it doesn't even benefit the authors.
This is indeed an issue, but it is then up to authors to find better representation the way that athletes have so they can get a larger share in the value they create.
I would have imagined these physical costs to be significant, though not the main or dominant cost drivers.
I would also love to see some numbers.
Update: Clearly ebook distribution has costs that physical book distribution does not. The implication here is that I believe the marginal costs of electronic distribution, on a per-book or even per-title basis, to be minimal relative to physical. But I acknowledge that this too is only in my imagination and not based on empirical fact.
My iPhone apps could have certainly benefited from marketers and QA ('editors'), but neither were pre-reqs to getting my app on the store.
Before the internet, when media was physical, you needed a publisher to help you manufacture the book as well as market it. In the internet age, people can produce their own product now. Anyone can make their own ebook and put it on their website for download, but no one is going to download it without substantial marketing efforts. That's why publishers are still needed.
However, I think it's BS that ebooks sometimes cost more than physical books.
I am less certain than you / the publishers are that the market really gives a damn about all that. For most readers, a plain epub may be good enough.
Is that expensive effort necessary? Or does it have the nature of gilt hand-illustrated drop caps: something that the market learns to live without in return for a radical reduction in price.
Give me the text and I'll add a version of Readability (same typesetting for all fiction books would be fine for me, there might be particular text features that need specially treatment occasionally I imagine). Cover art is usually pretty formulaic I can't really see most authors paying [to a graphic artist/designer] more than a days wages for subsequent covers, perhaps a week for the first one.
Presumably with an e-book reader I can set set the kerning/leading/font-size/font-weight/etc. ?
With e-books you could set 2 prices, edited and unedited, call them different names if you like. Then authors can decide how much they want to spend on editors - in some cases I'm sure they add a huge amount, probably define the work, in others not so much.
I guess director's cuts of DVDs create more overall profit? Why not the same for a book?
However, my main thought was that if the original sells better one could consider ditching a costly full-edit and simply having it sub-edited or even skip to proofreading only.
I've seen every error you can imagine, from the wrong table graphic being used to pathetic OCR errors or just plain typos. And the cover art, at least on most of the ebooks I've purchased, is nonexistent or extremely unimpressive. As a consumer, I certainly don't feel like ebooks are worth the prices being charged.
Show us the numbers then. The publishers won't.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/05/cmap-9-e...
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/03/why-the-...
(He's also cstross on HN, and I doubt he's going to miss commenting on this thread)
The notion that you might be swayed by a true reckoning of the cost basis for a book is thus a little strange. What do you care? If the market price for a popular ebook is $0.50 less than what Amazon is charging, any author capable of writing a popular book could make a mint taking their book directly to market.
I don't believe that the cost of converting from physical to virtual doesn't lead to significant cost cuts. No shipping. No warehouses. No physical shops in expensive locations. No warehouses.
In what possible set of circumstances would you want to discourage people from making you more money?
With physical books, publishers pay for production, freight, and centralized storage for distribution to retailers.
Retailers pay for maintaining their own active inventories, including warehousing and shipping from their warehouse to individual stores, as well as paying for physical retail space.
(And if bookstores don't sell the books within three months, they can return them [hardcover] or strip them of their covers and trash them [paperback] and get a complete refund. Talk about uncertainty.)
Only one actor -- the publisher -- sets the suggested retail price, upon which the discounted price a retailer pays is based.
I mostly agree with this, but at the same time I can't help but wonder if the author Dale Brown would get such prominent shelf placement if his name were something else.
One reason is simple economics: there's no perfect substitute for a specific book. If I want the next book by my favorite author, buying another book with a similar looking cover won't really do it. So price wars aren't as competitive as they are in, say, the grocery store.
But the bigger reason is that it costs a lot to produce quality books at scale.
First a publisher has to decide to make the investment. This means an editorial assistant or intern needs to read hundreds of manuscripts. Agents will read thousands of queries and hundreds of books to find one that they will actually publish. The actual editors will ready ten or twenty books for each one that they want to make an offer on--and then usually not end up with the winning bid. Which means starting over and looking for another book.
Don't forget that when an editor is trying to acquire a book, she has to consult with marketing, sales, and other groups in the company who will judge how well they will be able to support the book. To get a few good books, they have to run through this process many times. Don't forget that contracts need legal review and an accountant need to make sure that the author is paid.
Once a book is acquired by a publisher, the editor takes it through several revisions, which will usually substantially alter it. In this stage a book may suddenly become very emotionally compelling or gripping--in ways that a casual reader wouldn't have predicted. Or maybe it will lose a boring introduction that would have turned readers off before they got to the good parts.
Once a book is edited, it needs to be typeset and copyedited, which means a lot more reading by a few more people. Also, it needs a cover design, and possibly interior art, which needs not only to be created but art directed. And legal may need to review it if there are usages of brand names or other potential issues.
At this point, we actually have a book. It looks like a book, it reads like a book, and it could now realistically be tested against a target market. There's no such thing as a minimum viable product for a book. I'd like to see a more scientific, testing-based approach in publishing, but often the book doesn't come together into a hit-worthy package until you've done the work to take it all the way. You might have ten books with hit potential, but only one of them comes out of this process having fulfilled its potential.
Now, someone needs to put the book out and actually market it. This means a publicity person needs to get the word out to the press, and marketers who buy ads and run campaigns. In the modern world, someone needs to be on facebook and twitter. Often this is the author, but it's still adding to the amount of work that went into the book. The author will probably also be touring around in meatspace, possibly paid for by the publisher and possibly not, but that money is coming from the consumers no matter what.
The book files will need to be archived and corrected for future editions, and someone will need to manage the financial relationship with the author as the book is published across print editions and various ebook retailers, each with its own quirks and process.
And speaking of ebook retailers, they need to get paid to! Their 30% has to cover all the costs of running their operation, which may include subsidizing ereader devices and all the costs of negotiating with both the big publishers and the hundreds of little ones.
Even after this painstaking process, many books will fail. A bunch will barely earn back their investment. The regular-sized hits will keep the business afloat, and the mega-hits will make it worth being in the business in the first place.
It's really hard to predict whether people will like your final product until you put that final product out into the marketplace. For entertainment products this is especially true, because a little bit of polish makes a huge difference. I'm sure I've missed things, but keep in mind that the cost of printing and shipping most books is less than $2 for a hardcover, less than $1 for a paperback.
Is there a better way to do this? Of course there is. But it isn't here yet, and it's a lot harder than you think (but I highly encourage you to try!). Someday, someone will figure out how to crowdsource a lot of this or turn it into a scientific numbers-driven process, but early experiments have not made a lot of progress.
tl;dr Producing good books at scale is expensive and requires creating a lot of not-so-good books as a side product. The physical manufacture has never been the main cost driver.