
How Much Should an E-Book Cost? - raju
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/weekinreview/17rich.html?_r=3&partner=rss&emc=rss
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pchristensen
As much as people are willing to pay for it? The price sends a signal, and a
higher price signals "THIS IS WORTH SOMETHING." Nearly all the internet is
free so people assume it's worth $0.00.

My advice to Kindle writers and App Store devs, don't fall for the $9.99 or
$4.99 "caps". Charge what it's worth, charge where you make the profit and
sales you're comfortable with, and don't worry about the whiners.

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Confusion
I sure hope people aren't willing to pay $30 for a Kindle version of a book
that sells for $35. They don't don't need storage space or stocks, they don't
have to print it or take a loss on shipping. All those advantages and that is
supposed to save only $5? We're being ripped off here. I wouldn't consider
that a proper prize if they gave me the Kindle for free. Cut it to $10 and
I'll start considering whether it's worth buying the Kindle.

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mtoledo
You shouldn't be making your decision on how much money they are saving, but
on how much value you are getting.

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anigbrowl
Oh yes you should. They (publishers) set the price of things, so if they're
not having to pay for any of the things that they always said makes printing
books so expensive, then it's reasonable to ask where the money is going.
'Formatting for e-book'? don't make me laugh, that's trivial in the case of
something like a novel which is just a long stream of text with occasional
chapter headers.

The fact is that publisher want to obscure what a small proportion of the
cover price usually goes to the author, because with the advent of E-Books
it's a valid question whether authors need publishers the way way they used to
any more.

Edit: this isn't the whole story of course - naturally, a book does have value
to the reader (though it's not always obvious until after you've read it!).
Also, having been screwed by a publisher in the past I'm a little cynical
about the breed :)

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moe
I agree with your point that the money belongs to the authors, not to a
middleman.

You have to take into account however that production/handling costs don't
play a role in ebook pricing. Publishers make ebooks expensive for a single
reason: to slow ebook adoption as much as they can.

They have long realized that once the cat is out the bag their business model
inevitably ends (cf. the music industry). And since they can't do anything to
prevent it, they at least do their best to _slow_ it...

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4ensic
Quite an interesting way to frame the discussion. The question addressed is
actually "How much will people pay to read a file on a Kindle?".

If I buy a real book, I have a physical object I can lend or give away. If I
"buy" an e-book that's encumbered with DRM, I'm buying a license to view a
work on a specific device. Amazon can remotely disable various features I've
already paid for.

Make the ebooks portable (e.g. PDF) and DRM-free and you can directly compare
them to paper, but not until then.

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tialys
Once again, a dying industry cries "The internet will destroy us!"

Why not embrace the internet, change your model and MAKE IT WORK. Have we
learned nothing from the music industry? If the customer demands that the
books be $9.99, you don't tell the customer to shove off, you make it work at
$9.99.

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electromagnetic
Are you truly so uninformed that you think everything offline is dying? It's
been consistently shown that there has been no decline in the sale of 'paper'
books, and the e-book sales are currently an entirely independent market with
no effect on sales in the traditional market. [Ed: Sorry the last statement
was a little incorrect, it's actually been shown through companies like Tor
that the release of some of their free e-books has actually boosted paper book
sales; those e-books are really killing that old system!]

If anything, book publishers have been seeing record sales of some books due
to increased fan awareness and the ease of access to purchasing, like Amazon,
thanks to the internet.

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moe
_It's been consistently shown that there has been no decline in the sale of
'paper' books, and the e-book sales are currently an entirely independent
market with no effect on sales in the traditional market._

While I agree that his hyperbole was a bit over the top I also think that
you're playing it down a bit too much.

The e-ink technology is making its first babysteps just now but it's already
clear that we'll have true e-paper (bendable, rollable displays) in the near
future.

Ten years from now you _may_ still be able to buy dead-tree books. But I'm
pretty sure they and especially newspapers and magazines will be on a sharp
decline, in favor to just downloading the content to your personal reader
device. Twenty years from now our kids will shake their heads about that past
era of dead-tree books, just like today they wonder how we could ever exist
without cellphones. A common, parental dialogue in 2029: "No search-function,
no hyperlinks, no updates, no dictionary lookup? Are you kidding me, daddy?"

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ChrisXYZ
What's funny is that many online only e-books are sold for much higher prices.
I'm talking about the ones with those long infomercial-style sales letters
that target niche audiences and promise to solve all their problems.

$40 for a .pdf with large font and only 90 pages of content is not unusual at
all. Neither is stuff in the $70 range. The high price is due to the supposed
"value" of the information.

I've actually always thought those e-books were totally overpriced, but I
guess a lot of people had no problem buying them.

It's weird though how the set point for price is expected to be much lower for
more traditional books that have been ported over, even though in many, many
cases the real life books offer tons more value than a cheaply thrown together
e-guide to parrots or dating or something.

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pchristensen
The physical books ported over have the lower price _because they're
comparable to the physical book_. People have expectations about what physical
books cost, but people buying the parrot e-books are looking for specific
information that's not available in a bookstore. At that point they're buying
specific knowledge, not a commoditized product.

For instance, if I want to enter the import/export business, am I better off
paying $99 to International Living or spending hours scrounging the internet,
trying to sift what's real from what's fake, what's trustworthy from the
scams, etc? If you value your time, informational e-books can be a lifesaver,
even if their delivery medium (poorly formatted pdf files) is cheap.

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frossie
_But publishers argue that those costs, which generally run about 12.5 percent
of the average hardcover retail list price, do not entirely disappear with
e-books._

Am I stupid or does that make no sense? If the cost of the physical materials
of a hardcover is only 12% ($2-3 on a $20-30 book), why isn't the paperback
only $2-3 cheaper than the hardback?

I don't object to paying as much as the paperback for an ebook; I object to
paying as much as the hardback. If they can make money on the paperback, they
should be able to make money on an e-book that sells about as much as the
paperback.

~~~
pg
Publishers that publish books in both formats usually use them for price
discrimination. Hardcover editions are sold to people who aren't price
sensitive. And they usually come out first, so if you want a new book right
away, you have to buy the expensive edition.

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frossie
... but you also get a better book for your money (good binding, acid-free
paper, larger print). Whereas the current e-book pricing model seems to be to
charge the hardback price while the book is in hardback and above the
paperback price (so 9.99 Kindle download while the paperback is 7.99) when the
paperback comes out. It is no wonder that people find that unfair.

Moreover publishers gain from e-books in other ways (eg. by killing the
second-hand market).

No matter what is or is not "fair", the reality is that I, a generally early
adopter with a comically bad shelving problem, would _like_ to get into
e-books but hesitate to do so due to pricing and DRM concerns. If people like
me are not jumping into the water, I think it shows that there is a large
untapped market that would respond to better pricing. If volume goes up, price
can go down.

Right now my wishful thinking involves a Netflix for books; basically pay a
subscription be able to have 1-3 books "out" on a Kindle (for the sake of
argument) at a time. If I like them, I would probably go and buy the hardback
to keep/lend/re-read/get-signed but most times I probably wouldn't.

Edit: I think that O'Reilly's Safari is close to that model, but a captive
device like Kindle and Amazon's huge catalogue would take that to a whole
different level.

~~~
pg
You don't usually get a better book for the money, actually. That was true up
till about 1970. Nowadays hardcover editions are no better made than
paperbacks; merely bulkier. They're now almost pure price discrimination.

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frossie
I am... surprised. I live in a very high humidity location (cue ukuleles) and
mass market paperbacks just disintegrate (literally in some cases; the glue
denatures and they fall apart) and the pages yellow very quickly.

Trade paperbacks - it depends on the book, clearly the quality varies a lot.

Hardbacks, on the other hand, do quite well if you can keep the mold and the
termites away.

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sdfx
So Amazon is paying publishers 3$ more than they make on each book, yet the
best deal they are willing to offer to newspapers is 30% of their revenue?

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2009/05...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2009/05/06/AR2009050603754.html)

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smanek
Considering that Newspapers lose money on each sale, it sounds good.

For example, a $1 newspaper costs the paper $1.50 to print and distribute. In
theory, they are supposed to make back that 50 cent loss (plus cover all their
other operating expenses) on advertising.

So, for a newspaper, my options are: 1) Sell a hardcopy at a $.50 loss and
make $1 in profit on advertising, netting a $.50 profit 2) Make $.30 on a
Kindle sale, $.50 in advertising, netting a $.50 profit, netting $.80 profit
(as of now, advertisers usually won't pay as much for electronic ads).

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sdfx
are there ads in the electronic (kindle) version of the newspaper?

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hernan7
Maybe there is room here for some alternative e-book-only business model (that
doesn't involve parrots)?

Get some unknown authors, outsource the slush reading, concentrate on some
niche genres, don't put ads on the NYT. Make sure the books are fun to read
and price the Kindle version at $2.00.

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kingkawn
I would pay more for the work of writers and artists whose overall careers I
want to support. I will buy Saramago's books and Outkast's albums.

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patrickg-zill
I would say about $2 provided that the piracy issue is solved in one way or
another. Essentially 75 cents to author, 25 cents to overhead and editing, 25
cents to distribution/billing costs, plus 75 cents profit.

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Tichy
Doesn't the NYT have the silliest approach of them all? I mean the random
selection of "login required" or "login not required".

What happened to that plugin for sharing logins, would it work on the NYT?

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TweedHeads
99cts

