Comments on: Ebook prices aren’t dropping faster because they weren’t too high before

By: bookolico

bookolico — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 11:39:52 +0000

http://blog.bookolico.co.uk/2013/01/10/cutting-the-average-price-of-an-ebook/

Here you can find our innovative pricing system! I would be very happy to explain you more about our project.

By: Melisa Peters

Melisa Peters — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 17:57:54 +0000

@Winstuff, stop telling us how much tablets and ereaders cost. Authors don’t get a share of the profits of those expensive devises at all, so why start explaining cost to everyone. And no, you won’t get books for a dollar either. I don’t know what kinds of books you are talking about. you can go to Project Guttenburg and see what they have but as far as new, full-price quality, convenient ebooks, you will not get those for a buck so stop dreaming, please. When that day comes, authors will simply find other things to do with their time, saying as how they can’t even LEGALLY get the FONT to write the book without paying that artist $20. Yes, writing fonts cost a minimum of $20 when you purchase. and book cover artists expect royalties. these costs don’t vanish because the book is an ebook, so please, please stop.

By: Clemens

Clemens — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 17:48:03 +0000

@LXS, hey, that’s a great idea! If you want to read something for free, after you finish drinking your tea just read the leaves! Brilliant idea!

By: Diane

Diane — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 16:07:42 +0000

It’s gouging in my book… When we buy an Ebook there is no printing or shipping costs so shouldn’t they at least be cheaper than the paperback??

By: winstuff

winstuff — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 18:13:19 +0000

As tablets take over from readers, the price of ebook titles will fall to a buck. Here’s why: Buyers sincerely believe that all digital media should be free but they will tolerate paying about a buck a title.

And buyers are right. If we can’t resell a purchased item, we never owned it. Its inherent value is diminished. Ebooks prices today are tied to print titles but that bond is exactly what’s about to break.

This will be Apple’s moment: Amazon sells a cheap tablet (razor) so it can many books (blades) at 10 bucks. Apple sells an premium tablet, so it doesn’t care what the book price is. Tunes are a buck, apps are a buck, shows will soon be a buck, and on tablets, book titles will be a buck too … also. Apple will finally underprice Amazon, which has been underpricing publishers and resellers for a decade. Turn about is fair play.

By: Rick

Rick — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 17:08:16 +0000

Actually, the long view on publishing is that the industry is a mess right now. Prices on ebooks are way up because publishers got greedy and still wanted to use the same business model as for print, which with a lower overhead brings much larger profits. Ebooks are almost pure profit items despite the whining and moaning about costs. At the same time it’s harder for authors to get a foothold and royalties are down. Add to that increased retail competition online and a tech industry that regards any content merely a way to sell tablets that become obsolete every few months. Youthful writers, enthralled with this new digital format (which actually took around 30 years to develop) are making excuses for bad business models and buying into the promises of unlimited delivery channels by the tech folks. Time to sit back and get real or the whole thing will go bust just like videotext in the ’80′s.

By: LXS

LXS — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 13:07:15 +0000

Reading the tea leaves now to try to understand what’s really going on in the paper/ebook marketplace misses the far larger point of the disruptive changes in play that will radically transform the publishing industry.

Many industry pundits agree that popular trade books will be 80% e in the foreseeable future — within 5, 8 or maybe 12 years. At that point, paper book prices will rise considerably relative to today — a luxury for those that still enjoy paper — while ebook frontlist prices will fall relative today, maybe to $9.99, maybe lower. In between today and the e-dominated world, the cost structure of current publishers will break down, leaving the Big 6 or 4 or 2 in an altered form or no form at all.

The big winners in this transformation will be consumers, authors and the platform(s) that connect the two. Whether publishers continue to play a major role in this world is up to them, depending on their answer to the question: how will we continue to create value in a post-digital book world? Those that think “consumers will still buy frontlist ebook prices when we raise prices” seem to believe that publishers live in a world where downward sloping demand curves don’t exist. However, consumers live in the real world.

Needless to say, it is WAAAAYYYY too early to read too much into the disruption of the book industry by looking at today’s prices on Amazon.

By: Stickler Editing

Stickler Editing — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 17:36:15 +0000

Agreed, unfortunately. For many of the reasons you’ve outlined, it’s quite clear there’s not going to be any price drop coming anytime soon…

By: William Ockham

William Ockham — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 23:41:56 +0000

This article has a number of factual inaccuracies and misleading statements. First, although Penguin has announced that it will be settling, its ebooks are not yet covered by the settlement terms. It’s is misleading to say that four out of the publishers have settled with the DoJ . Moreover, the settlements certainly haven’t been in place for eight months as the article seems to suggest. It is really very early to measure the full impact of the settlement agreements. When both Random House and Penguin are covered by the settlement terms, there will be a more noticeable drop in ebooks prices.

The most egregious falsehood in this article is the claim that “ebook prices aren’t dropping faster because they weren’t too high before”. Yes, they were too high before. The average ebook was overpriced by at least an amount between 25 cents and $1.32, based on the terms of the settlement. Interestingly, the decrease in the prices of bestselling ebooks covered by the settlement is generally in that range. To ignore these facts is to go beyond ignorance and venture into the realm of the apologist and propagandist.

Only the foolish or the misinformed expected a huge ebook price war. I don’t know if John Sargent believes the nonsense he’s spewing, but anyone else who does is naïve in the extreme.

When the article discusses the current state of pricing under the settlement terms, it really goes off the rails. Saying that “publishers are now free from Apple’s price bands” is a little like saying that the Emancipation Proclamation freed slave owners from their responsibility to care for their slaves. It is an insult to your readers to pretend that the price bands were a limit on publishers when the reality is that they served to limit retail price discounting.

Owens also wants us to believe that each publisher has been able to negotiate the same deal individually as they did through the illegal collusion. I find that quite unlikely.

The final insult is the implication that ebook prices are higher because Amazon has more competition in the ebook space. Really? We’re supposed to believe that more competition results in higher prices? On what planet? Of course, everyone knows that the real competition is between traditional print books and ebooks. The metric that matters is the spread between the retail price of the print bestseller and the retail price of the same ebook title. The smaller the spread, the better for the Big 6/5/4. The bigger the spread, the better for consumers and the industry as a whole because the quicker the transition to digital, the better for everyone besides the current market leading incumbents.

By: Nate the great

Nate the great — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 20:06:46 +0000

You could be right about the competition. Amazon might be avoiding the deep sales because they know someone would match them, thus reducing Amazon’s benefit.

But I’m not sure how that would square with Amazon’s willingness to match everyone else’s sale prices, That’s a situation where Amazon gains very little and yet they still do it. Admittedly that is at the expense of the smaller publisher and authors, but Amazon is still competing on price.

I still think that the earlier growth were due to lower prices supported by the expensive hardware and the deeper discount Amazon secured from publishers. Of course, I said as much in the quote