I've always assumed that e-books are expensive because their buyers are known to be affluent. Once everyone uses an e- reader they'll find some new way to segment the market--e-hardcover vs. e-paperback, so to speak. Maybe you'll just pay more to get a book early.
>I've always assumed that e-books are expensive because their buyers are known to be affluent.
That's probably part of it, yeah. Maybe we'll see that eroding with the spread of smartphones.
The problem there is that generating multiple versions of the ebook throws away some of the economic appeal. The segmentation between hardcovers and paperbacks is natural in the format: once the hardcovers sell out, and nobody's willing to pay hardcover prices any more, you need to make a cheaper edition, so you make paperbacks, which require you to spend effort on laying out the book again. With ebooks, once you generate the initial edition, there's no inherent need to invest in the book ever again. Once it stops selling at $20, you just cut the price.
To yield segmentation like this, there'd have to be a strong economic incentive, or else a cheap way of generating the multiple editions. Maybe if the high-end version had pictures, and the low-end version didn't; then you could build them both from the same source file.
>they'll find some new way to segment the market //
I'm guessing time-limited DRM (built in to the reader which the book is produced for - the publisher keeps a private key and encrypts, gives you a public key for reading which is tied with some physical time variant aspect of the device).
Also they'll probably have locked fonts that are really hard to read so that poorer people can still give them money but will get headaches when they use the e-reader.
This is already happening. Many ebooks published in the last year, I noticed, started at one price, and have been coming down.
It seems in the first year, the price is usually $12.99-$15.99, but after a year or so, the price drops to $9.99.
I figure in 5 years we'll see several pricing tiers:
$22.99- premium new book from a big name author
$17.99- premium book with a following (Eg: the next Twilight book in a series.)
$15.99- regular "hardcover" price for a new book.
$13.99- Discount hardcover price for a new book.
$9.99- The standard back catalog price for books published
in the last 10 years, or which still have strong sales.
$7.99- Discount, pulp or paper back price (this is currently the common price on sci-fi paperbacks, or at least used to be, I suspect its higher now with inflation.)
$5.99- Discount book or pamphlets, like guides and introductions, or older less popular paperback type books.
$3.99- premium articles.
$0.99- Short articles
If the market is allowed to sort itself out, and ebooks become popular, this is the type of pricing we can expect, and this is the type of pricing you currently have in bookstores. A spectrum of prices to fit a spectrum of products.
This is good. It allows for experimentation with low prices, or high prices to try and make a viable business.
It would be really sad for book publishers to be locked into a pricing model that makes them increasingly irrelevant, and thus to have the book industry die the way the newspaper industry is dying.
But maybe its just that I don't mind waiting a year for books to get them for $9.99. And if I really want the book, I don't mind paying $22.99.
The convenience of having my whole library on my phone far outweighs any difference in pricing between physical and ebooks. Even if they're the same price, I'll still buy the ebook, though I think on the balance ebooks will be mostly cheaper.
