
WTF is... up with e-book pricing? - _grrr
http://www.reghardware.com/2010/11/26/wtf_e_book_pricing/
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roel_v
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...)

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Tichy
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
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.

~~~
Tichy
"which yes will make it cost more than a paperback while ebooks remain a
secondary release"

You mean because paperbacks use the formatting from the hardcover edition, so
their formatting comes for free?

I am still not convinced that your maths is really set in stone. For example,
does the retailer still need to get 40%? Editors and proof readers are the
same for ebooks as for paperbacks, hopefully.

How hard is the formatting of an ebook, what does it entail? I don't think
they can just add new paragraphs? Couldn't the process be automated (LateX
seems to be doing quite well with automated layout?

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nikgregory
Actually Latex does a pretty crappy job routinely producing widows and
orphans. The only way to change this seems to screw up the pagebreaking.

When was the last time you saw a widow or orphan in a book? I'll bet never for
one from a major printer.

There are many things done in books to hugely improve readability that all
have to be re-learnt and redone.

Also, yes paperbacks can use the same formatting as the hardcover if the page
proportions are the same. Just an FYI hardcovers usually have larger fonts and
the page can sometimes simply be scaled down without screwing anything up. So
yes, sometimes it is free.

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loewenskind
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.

~~~
petercooper
_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.

~~~
tptacek
Almost nobody really does this, so the economic value of resaleability can't
be huge.

~~~
arethuza
I like to think I get a decent amount of goodwill from friends by
giving/lending books to them.

This generates additional sales of the books as I often end up buying
additional copies once I forget who I lent a book to - I'm on my fourth copy
of A Fire Upon The Deep.

~~~
wlievens
There's a saying that goes something like: never _lend_ a book, always _give_
it.

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epynonymous
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
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
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
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
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
_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
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.

------
lt
Charles Stross has a written an interesting piece about this in his blog:

[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2010/05/cmap-9-e...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2010/05/cmap-9-ebooks.html)

~~~
arethuza
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
"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.

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steve19
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
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?

