Budget Pet Peeve: Digital Books

[NotUrsula]

It's a misconception that you need to get over. Agency pricing notwithstanding, the truth is that ebooks are quite expensive to produce and protect in the current market, due to the plethora of software platforms that are available. Until the platforms standardize, the cost to produce these titles will remain high, because IT staff and copyright attorneys are not precisely cheap.

Publishers have never paid for warehousing and freight; that cost was always borne by the wholesalers. The do pay for layout and printing, but their largest cost by far is marketing, which is still required for ebooks.

 

[Kitzka]

It's a misconception that you need to get over. Agency pricing notwithstanding, the truth is that ebooks are quite expensive to produce and protect in the current market, due to the plethora of software platforms that are available. Until the platforms standardize, the cost to produce these titles will remain high, because IT staff and copyright attorneys are not precisely cheap.

Publishers have never paid for warehousing and freight; that cost was always borne by the wholesalers. The do pay for layout and printing, but their largest cost by far is marketing, which is still required for ebooks.

I just wanted to thank you for posting this. It is a HUGE misnomer that Ebooks cost less than physical books. There may not be the printing costs but there are the cost of keeping up with technology, ensuring the books are properly protected, marketing, etc.

If you can not browse for a new author online how would you discover he or she if not for the extensive marketing? in a bookstore you can stumble upon a book but it is much less likely to happen online.

I don;t know about you but as much as i love my regular authors i LOVE discovering someone new.

Lara

 

[RitaE]

Well - I actually disagree that anybody needs to "get over" anything. It's obvious that it is quite possible to turn profits in the lower priced book level because the numbers of people that are doing it grow exponentially all the time. We're even see more and more brand name authors leave their Publishers completely, hire their own editors and cover artists, and self-publish at least some of their newer titles.

There are thousands and thousands of eBooks available at every price point and the lower cost eBooks are what is fueling the market right now. Publishing houses and authors right now that are selling in the below $7 range are finding huge success. Even the Agency Publishers seem to be waking up to that fact with all their recent sales where they are putting books out there in the $1 to $5 ranges.

As long as a reader is willing to divorce from their list of must have authors and books, it is more than possible to find plenty of good material to read at any level. I personally almost never pay over $5 to $6 for any book and most of the books I read are far less than even that.

 

[EveDallas]

I think I'm the only one in the world who just isn't in to the e-readers. I love good ole paper books.

Not the only one. Nothing can replace the feel of an actual book for me

 

[puffkin]

This has been really irritating me too. I have a Kindle and I do get lots and lots of things for free or nearly free. But there are also lots of popular books that I want to read too like The Help or the newest Janet Evanovich. But at $12.99 a pop, that just seems so expensive to me for a digital version. Not to mention that a vast majority of the more expensive books are not lendable.

My price point for newer release eBooks is in the $5-$7 range. I think that is fair and seems to be a pretty popular opinion on other boards that I have read. Why do you think Water for Elephants has been selling so well???? I snatched up a bunch of things when Amazon had their Summer Beach reading list as those were priced well and I hadn't read a lot of them.

I really hope when the Kindle Library Lending comes out that the prices will creep back down. I am also interested to see what the Harry Potter books will cost when released. I just reread my hardcover set a few weeks ago (in anticipation of the movie) and I definitely can assure you that reading on my Kindle is so much nicer than hauling around huge bulky tomes and it was unbelievable how much more tired my eyes got.

 

[bumbershoot]

What I find satisfying is not dusting shelves and shelves of books!!

This this and this! Also, I don't have to rent an apartment bigger than I really need, just to keep the books in.


I thought I'd had the e-readers...thought it would be hatred with a large burning passion, and within a week I questioned why I'd ever thought that. The feel to my eyes is that I'm reading a mass market paperback, and I love that the Kindle weighs the same no matter how "big" the book is. Right now I go back and forth between the Kindle and library books, and library books are just so awkward! I do a lot of reading in bed, and the Kindle isn't a featherweight, but it's not as awkward.


As for pricing...publishers will do what publishers will do!

 

[i*heart*minniemouse]

I saw a site mentioned last week on one of the news shows in the morning. www.ebookfling.com and it is a site that allows you to borrow ebooks for 14 days. You do have to purchase credits and redeem them for the books you want to borrow. Much cheaper than buying new. I still have a few books that I need to read that I purchased so I have not tried renting any books...I have signed up at the site though.
Barb

 

[Duckyiam71]

I must admit at this point, I would be willing to pay the same price for the ebook as a hardback. BUT I just finished unpacking 3 boxes of books and I cant find a place to put them. We just finished moving and I can't believe we have all these books. This is not counting what we put in storage. I use overdrive from the Air Force library and search consistently for free books on Amazon. Ask me in a few weeks when I am settled in and I might change my tune.

 

[NotUrsula]

Sorry, I didn't make myself clear. When I was referring to the misconception that needed to be gotten over, I was specifically referring to this line in the OP's post:

I am irritated that every digital book that I have bought recently costs equal to or in many cases more than the printed version of the book. My "budget" mentality is that the digital books should be cheaper than the printed book as they are definitely cheaper to produce.

I was merely pointing out that they are NOT cheaper to produce in most cases (the exceptions being art books, for the most part.)

Yes, there are plenty of lower-priced ebooks available, but that doesn't mean that they were cheaper to produce than hardcopy; it just means that the publisher is willing to live with the profit margin produced by that price point on that title.

The truth is that most publishers make their best profit on the backlist rather than the frontlist, mostly because once a title moves into the backlist no more marketing money is spent on it. However, backlist sales of fiction depend rather a lot on new readers discovering a particular author, and outside of academic circles, that most often happens for one of two reasons; either because of a movie tie-in (marketing again), or because the person read a newer title by the same author and decided to go back and read more of the person's older works (and the marketing once again for the new title.)

 

[katrina1122]

Just because it's digital it shouldn't be that much cheaper. The publisher still has to get paid so it can pay the author. If you discount the digital books too low authors will stop allowing their books to become converted into digital format.

I LOVE my kindle, but not so I can have cheap books. If you bought an ereader to save money on books you did it for the the wrong reason. You have to remember that they have to pay someone to reformat the print material into digital format, pay the publisher and the author. They can't be that cheap or no one would make money on them.

I'm not saying I don't love the discounts when they happen, but expecting them is unfair to the author.