WTF is... up with e-book pricing? | Hacker News Reader

WTF is... up with e-book pricing?

reghardware.com

17 points_grrr37 comments

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...)

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.

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.

"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?

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.

No, I'm not saying that making ebooks more expensive than paperbacks makes sense, and yes I do realize that this happens sometimes. What I'm saying is that the grand ideas there were a few years ago about surely if a paperback costs $10, the ebook can be sold for $2 just don't make sense. I mean I thought so too, but it just isn't happening and it won't happen, either, because the perceptions that lead to such ideas are fundamentally flawed.

It's not the same product. Each has properties the other doesn't and can't have. I would expect a different price between them, and personally I'd value the ebook higher.

I think what people are failing to understand is that, you know, someone MAKES these things. They're not just farted out of thin air. A junior editor sifts through hundreds of submissions and passes it onto an actual editor, who passes it onto another, and then it passes to a third and if all four people liked it then they'll make an offer to buy it. Then it goes through several rounds of being edited, then finally it's proof read, then it passes through a typesetter who arranges text spacing, etc. to ensure they're not getting widows on pages (this applies to eBooks too!).

I made a post of this a while ago that hit big after last time a wholly ignorant post like this was made by someone not trying to comprehend the business they're complaining about. http://nikgregory.com/2010/02/of-amazon-and-ebooks/

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.

The main problem I have with ebooks is that a lot of the conversions are really shoddy bits of work - my Kindle copy of Surface Detail (by Iain M Banks) being the worst, lots of spaces missing between sections and inappropriate hyphenation.

Have you looked at ebook pricing recently? Often they cost more than the paperback, and sometimes more than the hardcover.

If I don't already have the book I would pay more for it in ebook format (provided the conversion is good). It's handier for me.

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.

That's really my main pain point. Paying more, for something I cannot transmit to my son or friends, really is currently unacceptable for me.

Complain to Amazon who is taking 40% of the cover price and restricting you.

I'm sure publishers likely love it, but read inside the cover of any book. Your right to resell it is enshrined in law (as long as you haven't destroyed it). Publishers have survived with books being traded and handed around. I'm sure they'd be fully satisfied if eBooks only had DRM to force the book to pass to someone else (IE not copying but truly transferring), as the industry has done exemplary with it.

Also, I can routinely find used books for $1 at garage sales. I bought the entire Ender series and Mars trilogy in almost mint condition for less than $1 a book as I couldn't move my collection with me when I immigrated to Canada. If cost was the true selling price for me on a book, I can get a lot of good quality books for a lot cheaper than anything on the open market, especially ebooks even when Amazon does ridiculously discount them.

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

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.

There's a saying that goes something like: never lend a book, always give it.

"Almost nobody really does this" is true for paperbacks and novels, but textbooks and other reference material do hold a huge resale value and are resold all the time.

The hordes of people reselling books on Amazon Marketplace don't convince me of your argument. I've sold quite a few books over the years but have given just as many away to charity shops (who make money from them). So even if I don't get the value back directly, I at least get the value of them acting as charitable donations. I also give away most books I'm given to review to learning developers who could benefit from them. I can't do any of that with an e-book. No biggie, but it reduces their monetary value to me.

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.

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?

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

Again, you're making the mistake of thinking that costs like printing or shipping have anything to do with it.

Saying an e-book should always be cheaper than a paper book is like saying that baseball tickets should always cost more than basketball tickets, because there are more players on the team.

The price of paper and ink and shipping has almost nothing at all to do with the price of books. Do you really think that hardcovers are that much more expensive to produce than paperbacks?

> 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.

I think that "in the process of" is critical. It hasn't yet stabilized. There are some genuinely weird things... for instance:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060555661?ie=UTF8&tag=... the paperback is half the price of the Kindle version!

I'm still not quite sure what I think about ebooks. Definitely convenient in some ways, but I like being able to hand a book I've read to my wife, or sell it used or whatever. Those things haven't quite been worked out, just yet.

Also, there's something a bit monotonous about reading everything in the same "form factor" with the same fonts.

It is absurd if I can get the same book as a paperback for less money - it is the same book, after all (essentially, digital information). Unless you are one of the rare people who has a huge advantage from just having the book electronically (like if you are traveling all the time), it just doesn't seem to make sense.

The paperback is delivered for free, too - it takes longer, but as a reader, I have some patience (it takes time to read a book, too).

If I like the paperback, I can pass it on to friends.

Carrying books around is inconvenient, but I rarely read a book twice within a short time span, so I really only take one or two books when I travel. On the other hand I don't have to worry about leaving my book on my seat on the train when I go to the toilet.

Moving and shelf space are an issue, on the other hand book shelves look good. Some people even buy fake book shelves with fake books to decorate places.

good points, but i think for me, the absurdity comes from the fact that there's no correlation between digital format and hardcopy. am i being taxed for the conversion process?

i think amazon does a decent job for most of their ebooks are much less (up to 80%) less than the hardcopies, i'm sure in some ways it's promotional to get more kindle users, but at the same time it's also a better medium for them to sell books so the volume of books sold and the savings they achieve from not having any inventory allows them to price this competitively.

plus, not to mention, a consumer must think of the total costs associated with purchasing digital content, the viewer, whether it be computer or device.

Although the cost of distribution of an e-book _is_ less than a paperback, the cost of making & distributing a paperback, or a hardback for that matter is not as much as people may think. Publishers sell some paperbacks for 99p & hardbacks for as little as £2, and still make a profit. Although agreed, an e-book should always cost the least. I still buy real books when they are for reference, usually hardbacks and not available on Kindle anyway, as the layout and ease of thumbing through is still unmatched by e-books, but I'll buy e-books for convenience when otherwise I might have bought a paperback.

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...

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.

"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.

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.

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?

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