Memo To Ian Fleming’s Heirs
mikecanex.wordpress.com
mikecanex.wordpress.com
Even if you can go and buy a paperback for $1, there are evidently enough people buying the $10 version (or they wouldn't sell it at that point).
If they price the eBook based on the competition from used paperbacks, they're going to risk people who would have paid $10 buying the cheap eBook instead. That may increase volume sales but given their age and the likely number you could shift even selling them for a $1 (after all there are plenty sat unsold in the second handbook shops, it's not like they're flying off the shelves even at that price) the total profit would be lower.
So you may not think it's not worth $10 but they know that most people think that and they don't really care. They'd rather sell to 100 people at $10 than 500 at $1 and if you're one of the 400 not buying at the higher price they're not fussed.
The other point is that I think people massively over estimate the cost of the physical medium for books. In the UK you can buy a printed copy of War and Peace (nearly 1000 pages) for £1 and at that price it's profitable. The paper is pretty low quality but it's 1000 pages, printed and shipped and profitable for both the publisher and the retailer. Given that I don't think we should expect massive differences between the cost of physical and eBooks.
There, fixed that for you. His argument is that they're trading short term gain for long term pain by turning customers into pirates or shudder library patrons.
Of course, it may be argued that they're maximizing long term gain at the expense of short term gain by "convincing" users that $10 is an appropriate price for off-list books.
I agree with the author, but there is merit to the other argument.
People aren't pirates or not pirates - there's nothing that says that once you become a pirate that's you for life. I'm sure there are people who've pirated stuff on here who also buy stuff. One incident doesn't determine your future behaviour.
The decision point is different for each person for each medium and each specific product. You may be willing to pay $5 for the new William Gibson but I may think it's worth $20. If they price it at $10 I think it's a bargain, you go looking for a torrent. We both read it, you love it, I hate it. Next time our valuations on it may be completely different and our actions completely different.
And with each transaction being an individual thing it all comes back to what you see as short term profit.
Mark Cuban recently posted a blog post that I think is the best explanation I've ever read as to why this trend seems to happen: http://blogmaverick.com/2010/10/26/the-value-of-your-time-an...
Honestly, has anyone gone trawling their local used book stores for books? It's fun, but sometimes it's REALLY hard to find the book you want. :) Eventually, something that's as convenient as this is a viable option if you value convenience and your time. And this is coming from someone who loves going to United Way used book sales.
Two ways: facility and habit.
There are still a lot of people out there who don't know how to use bittorrent nor how to convert pirate ebooks to display on a Kindle. Given enough incentive, they'll learn.
Second is habit. Nobody exhaustively checks alternatives every time. Once you've learned that ebook prices are usually too expensive, you don't even bother checking the price before you head to your favorite torrent site.
You're also making the assumption that book X has no substitute and that they must read this but this is rarely the case (and in those situations the item will actually almost always have a higher value to the individual increasing the price they're willing to pay).
If I look at the Spy Who Loved Me and I find that it's £5.25 on Amazon and I think that's not a good price, I could easily see that I could get Casino Royale for £4.35. If I think that's too expensive it would take me about 30 seconds to see that I could get The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo for £2.68 or the Lost Symbol for £2.76.
Piracy is not just not the only alternative and indeed I'd suggest that in the vast majority of cases it's not the main alternative.
(If you think that £2.68 is too much for a novel then might I ask what the reasonable price is at which you'd buy rather than pirate? My guess would be that it's likely to be in the area where the publisher essentially doesn't see you as a potential customer anyway (at least not a profitable one) and broadly doesn't really care what you do).
Beyond this you assume that initial attempts at piracy will be positive where research shows that this isn't the case. If someone attempts to find a torrent and spends half an hour battering their head against password protected files, dead links and so on, they're just as easy to write the whole thing off. At that point buying behaviour is actually reenforced as they now longer see downloading as a viable option.
As for habits the use of the work "exhaustive" to relate to an Amazon search which might take 30 seconds is misleading. I agree that you're not going to search 50 sites to find the best price but a search on Amazon to get a ballpark figure isn't onerous at all. Where someone has made some sort of investment in a new behaviour pattern it might be true that it was more of a one way trip but in this case the barrier to returning to legitimate purchasing is so low as to not be there.
EDIT: I would accept that there are some instances where book piracy will be (and is) rife. Generally these would be where the price is higher (computer or academic books for example) increasing the incentive, and where the potential customer / pirate is more familiar with the technology and therefore the barriers to moving into piracy are lower but for mass market books I don't see it being an issue in the way you describe.
For myself, if I'm going to read any old book, I'll grab one from the basement or from the library rather than paying $2 for something that will have negative value to me once I'm done with it. (my basement is filled with books, I don't need more). OTOH, I'll readily pay $30 if I have to read it now.
Sorry, no, I think you're unaware that there's no one price fits all in publishing. There's hardcover, trade paperback, mass-market paperback. That's three price levels, and not every book runs through all three.
Once upon a time, there was only hardcover, then Penguin revolutionized the industry with cheap paperbacks. I never see publishers whining about the lower prices of MMPBs. So why do they do this with eBooks?
Well said and good point.
I know that many publishers are justifying that they are charging near dead-tree version pricing because of "costs associated with conversion to eBook formats." That's a sham, because 99% of the eBooks out there do not even have formatting as nice as the printed books, nor do they have the photos or imagery associated with chapters. At least, the Amazon and Apple eBooks. I have seen some PDF eBooks from notable publishers (O'Reilly and Pragmatic) who format their eBooks quite nicely.
If publishers can make their eBooks look nearly as fantastic as their dead-tree versions (if not better), then I think it's fair to charge near dead-tree pricing. Otherwise, who are they fooling? Most of them are doing a "print to PDF" not actually formatting it.
Pricing is the hot topic in publishing right now. Notice how someone such as Konrath is raking in the dough with his $2.99 eBooks.
It doesn't matter what the publisher thinks the "value" is -- it's the price people are willing to pay that matters. Does Konrath think his stuff is devalued because it's no longer in paper form at a higher price? Or does he see the greater value in having a larger income?
Tell me, does being free devalue the software a lot of you use? I don't think so. But if they tried to price it, what would you be willing to pay?
You're all very smart people here (and I state that without any sarcasm), so I wonder if anyone here has devised any sort of pricing algorithm that could be applied to publishing?
I always hold up the Henry Ford model: he priced his cars cheap because he wanted them above all to be affordable and to sell. I think publishing needs to have the same attitude. When people disagree with that, I'm just puzzled and stumped.
The eBooks are priced that way because the estate is afraid of devaluing the Bond brand. (Publishers know that eBook pricing is a race to the bottom and they don't want to get there too soon.)
Bond is like Batman or Holmes. Three generations going and his adventures are still published and republished in hardback, special editions, omnibuses, and variant cover paperbacks. There's also a lucrative secondary market of neverending sequels and spinoffs.
The estate doesn't want to screw Penguin on pricing by offering an electronic version at $2 when the dead tree version is $15. That undercuts the publisher across the entire line of Bond products.
If technical books weren't already so expensive I would be willing to pay more for an equivalent eBook than a physical one.
Now, I love freedom of information, torrents, open source, and all of that, but putting myself in any author's shoes, I think it would be infuriating to hear this kind of argument. "I can pirate your book for free, so a fair price would be $1 dollar. I don't care how much work you put in it." (Yes, I know Ian Fleming is dead, but this applies to any other author as well)
It's not wrong to sell it for $10, it's not wrong for your price to be $1, the latter fact doesn't give you a license to pirate it simply because your personal price is lower.
You can sort of composite up a semi-universal concept of a "fair price" by looking at a suitably chosen large group of people but it's still just an approximation.