Ebook pricing

[ebartley]

I've been following the Amazon vs. Macmillan dispute and contemplating the question "So, how much should ebooks cost?"

Well ... there area several different "shoulds" -- reader, publisher, author, distributor, moral, and practical.

How much should ebooks cost from a reader's perspective? That one's easy -- as little as possible without causing future

Comments

[osewalrus]

Quite right that each player seeks to maximize profit and lower cost. What influences the factors here include not merely mass sales, but also the incompatibility of formats which prevents any one provider from capturing the market. This is what distinguishes current ebook pricing from physical book pricing. OTOH, physical book pricing tends to have physical bottlenecks in the distribution (e.g., Borders and Amazon have significant impact in the price chain because so many people buy books from them).

[ebartley]

I've only had a problem with incompatible formats when dealing with complicated PDFs and files with DRM(*). But then I'm a computer geek, so I would expect to underestimate that factor. Also, Calibre is a wonderful ebook management tool which includes conversion software and is written in open-source python so if I ever get myself in gear I can tweak it myself.

(*) While I have bought some content for the Kindle, Amazon has lost *more* sales from me because I effectively can't legally(**) keep that portion of my electronic library once I migrate off the Kindle -- and over the course of my the next forty years I consider it almost certain that I will.

(**) I think. It might fit into an exception about converting ebooks only available with DRM so that you can format-shift. And such an exception might or might not be valid at the time. My honest uncertainty - and yes, I've looked into this, or tried to anyway - means that the law is broken for lack of clarity, totally apart from being a sick law to begin with. What do you mean,

[lhn]

Variable pricing makes the most basic economic sense. On the other hand, Apple's experience with iTunes suggests that especially when creating the market, the frictional losses from administering a complex pricing scheme may outweigh the losses from just charging a flat, low rate and getting people used to buying the new class of product. Charging more for heavily restricted digital formats than hardcopy, which seems to be the instinct of many/most content owners when they have the choice, (and granted, they're understandably skittish about moving into uncharted waters) slows adoption early on and creates a big space for piracy.

That said, I'd be glad to see a big provider adopt Baen's pricing model coupled with Baen's multiformat, non-DRM policy. There, the relative complexity on the pricing end is matched by relatively low prices overall and a simple, customer-friendly approach to everything else.

[ebartley]

Oh, granted a flat pricing (or a firm maximum price; I can't see any way in which having books cost up to $9.99 would lose adoption over having books all cost $9.99) delays acceptance. This is part of why Amazon - which is making money off the reader as well as the individual files - is pushing back so hard. But unless the publishers (distributors, authors) believe this is going to gain them net profits, this isn't something they worry about: they'd be happy to stick to the paper format if it keeps making money.

When ebook piracy becomes endemic and cuts into paper sales, then they'll worry. Of course, by then the notion of just downloading your ebooks for free will have taken hold....