 formats keep changing and you have to keep buying new ones? That is (was?) the beauty of books, no technology involved in reading a book.
what you said, Didge – there’s no damn reason why e-books should be as expensive (or more so – where are the e-remainder racks?!) as paper books, and I think the reading/buying public is smart enough to realize that the publishers are charging us more for something that costs them far, far less. Of course the banking industry manages to get away with this, and with putting millions of bank tellers outta work, while charging us to withdraw our own money from ATM machines, but money is fungible – it IS convenient sometimes to use the machine and get the cash, whereas there’s no particular advantage to justify the limited selection, annoying spammy ads, expensive initial buy-in for the device, and the constant risk of losing this pricey item.
It’d be interesting to have McCaustic weigh in on this.
Exactly. And I don’t think it’s any coincidence that at the same time, hobbies like knitting and crocheting have skyrocketed. There’s an innate need for homey, tacticle things.
That’s already happened, too. There was that uproar when Amazon pulled both 1984 and Animal Farm from users’ Kindle because they’d accidently sent them illegal copies.
Just as an FYI…ebooks carry their own expenses apart from normal book distribution. There are production costs that can at times equal the costs of pages designed for print. Yes, you do not have the warehousing costs, but you have digital conversion costs, and elevated (sometimes double) author royalty rates. Plus, publishers are being asked to digitize their whole catalogs, running an investment of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I realize it’s not free to digitize books (although I don’t know what the actual cost is), but I’d really like to see a breakdown cost analysis of producing and selling an e-book vs. a hardcover. With royalties typically in the 8% range (or less) for the author doubling that doesn’t seem outrageous. Transportation is a huge cost, and with e-books it’s eliminated so there must be substantial savings there.
well, for e-books, most of the industry is settling on a 20-25% royalty for authors for e-book sales. At this time, you can hope to sell roughly 10-12 printed books for every e-book you sell (in our house, its more 100 to 1). I am sure once the market matures, and e-book sales gain a stronger footing, you will see prices drop to more reasonable levels. Our company sells mainly trade paperbacks at 14.99. Kindle sells at 9.99. Automatically a 33% off list price. So let’s assume a fifty/fifty split between publisher and reseller. That leaves the house with 5 dollars net. Author gets 25%, which leaves 3.75 for the house. Most e-books at this time (barring the best-seller) average around 100 units of sales on the kindle their first year. That means you’ve made $375 dollars on that book. Take $100 to convert your titles from designed page proofs to ePub format for distribution. That leaves you $275 to help defer costs of administration, editorial, marketing (you have to spend some). As you can see, the publisher is not exactly rolling in the dough as far as pure, un-expensed profit.
The bestseller model will be more advantageous, but as most books put out there will not sell nearly as many, the economics as the media portrays it are a little different then what is actually going on.
Now, as I said, all this will change as the ebook gains a larger percentage of sales for a released book.
Thanks for that breakdown, Nathan. I know Amazon and Wal-Mart’s price war over e-books is dragging them both into the red. When e-books were getting started, and Kindles and e-book readers were new(er), there were many places online to download e-books for a pittance, some as low as $.99, $2.99, etc. I remember people then being aghast at paying $10 for an e-book. I don’t begrudge publishers a fair price, hell as a wannabe author I’d like to make bank as well, but $35 for an e-book? I can wait until the price drops, I don’t need to read anything that badly.
Again, as an investment, if I buy a hardcover book for $25 I can donate it to the library, give it to a friend, swap it on FreeCycle, use it to prop up a wobbly table, or sell it for a couple of dollars on Ebay. If I spend 30% more on an ebook, the e-publisher wants me to keep it in my Kindle and that’s it – it pooches the whole purpose of digital technology, which is supposed to be speed of transmission and ease of portability.
I guess one of the things I love about books is their thingness – once I buy the object, or receive it as a gift, it is mine to do with as I please. Readers tend to be independent spirits – we do not like our media with strings attached.
understood. there should be a price break from print. The Stephen King book for sale at $35 is ridiculous…but has created quite the free marketing buzz for him hasn’t it?
No, you will see prices settle in long term between 10-15 dollars, with publishers giving short term price breaks and “sales”, again, once volume picks up, and publishers get metrics set up as to how e-books harvest print sales. That is the big question right now. Is it a tit-for-tat in regards to sales. IF it is, then print runs will have to be reduced, driving up the costs of print runs (shorter runs means higher unit costs) meaning that more revenue needs to be gathered from the ebook (i.e. higher price) to make the balance sheet even out.
I absolutely understand that it’s not free – maybe no even cheap – to digitize a book, but once the information is digitized, it’s done, and it costs next to nothing to transmit it to the customer. I just don’t see how that could compare to to the cost of printing, binding, packing, shipping and storing millions of individual copies of a paper book. As for the initial investment, or buy-in, that should be the e-publisher’s responsibility, not that of the customer – I wouldn’t pay 3X the price of a meal just because a new restaurant needed to recoup its investment.
Again, I just don’t see what I’m getting for all the money being asked of me.
That was kind of my thought too, that the digitization process, whatever that entails, equates to setting up for a print run. Once it’s done, it’s done. Even subsequent printings are already taken care of, in that sense. The infrastructure for transmitting the e-book was built by the cell phone carriers.
After having to buy an expensive piece of equipment to be able to read the e-book, the books themselves need to be affordable. If I feel like I’m being gouged on the price of the e-book, I’ll stick to the physical books. Cory Doctorow is giving away his books electronically via his Web site, releasing them simultaneously with the print releases.
that’s similar to what Prince has been doing with music – he gave away copies of his CD free to everyone who bought a ticket to his last concert tour, and industry insiders were furious b/c all those giveaways pushed the disc to number 1 on the charts. (And honestly, how cheap is it to burn a CD? He could probably afford to do this because the marketing and promotion costs weren’t eating him alive.) I say there is NO TRUER indicator of an artist’s popularity than the fact that all those people want to see him in person, and if he wants to boost his ratings while rewarding his fans, well then the little purple genius has cracked the code.
And Trent Reznor, allowing free downloads of his music from his site. I’m sure that’s only a viable tactic once an artist has reached the level of recognizability people like NIN and Prince have, they’re selling out concerts anyway.
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