E-books have become very popular over the last couple of years. A great deal of the credit for that should go to the Amazon Kindle reader which, whilst it may not have been the first reader to be released, has been a real driving force in the growth and development of the market for both e-book readers and the associated e-books.
E-books are predicted to make up somewhere between 12 to 15% of total book sales in 2011. The market is still developing, but e-books are becoming an ever more important factor in the publishing world. The importance of e-books may even be a little higher than the percentage sales suggest. At the risk of stating the obvious, it seems likely that e-book reader owners will be likely to buy, and read, a lot of books. They are, in other words, the target demographic for the major publishing firms.
So it’s important that publishers get the price of e-books right. Or else they run the risk of upsetting some of their best customers. So what, exactly, would a fair price for an e-book be?
E-books don’t use paper, ink or bindings. Also, since they are not a physical product, there are no fees associated with delivery. So you would expect them to be quite a bit cheaper than normal printed books, wouldn’t you?
Or maybe not. According to publishers, the cost of paper, ink, bindings and transportation is only a small part of bringing a book to market. There are editing costs, proof reading costs, marketing costs etc. All things considered, the lack of a few reams of paper is, according to a number of major publishers, neither here nor there.
To a certain extent, you can see some logic in this argument. But it begs the question why, if these factors don’t influence book prices, is there such a difference between paperback and hardback prices? The argument doesn’t ring true.
Until quite recently, Amazon had a publicly declared policy of setting e-book prices at $9.99 or less. Until the big publishing houses took issue with it at least. One publisher’s books were briefly withdrawn from Amazon’s site at one point.
The agency pricing model has now been adopted by many publishers. What that means that the publishers set the selling price instead of the retailer. You may, whilst searching Amazon for something to read on your Kindle 3, come across the notice “this price was set by the publisher” – which is just Amazon’s way of making it clear that they did not set the price for that particular book.
On the other hand, many business analysts have suggested that Amazon’s $9.99 target price was unsustainable in the long term and that this may have been a loos leader from Amazon to allow users to get accustomed to e-books whilst simultaneously boosting Kindle sales.
Unlike a printed book, you can’t pass on your e-book to friends and family when you’re done with it (Kindle owners can now “lend” e-books out – for a fixed period only). You can’t sell it to a second hand book store or donate it to a charity shop or local library. E-books offer fewer end of life options than a standard print book in other words. Considering that you have fewer options with e-books, shouldn’t the price also be lower?
Today, the selling price of an e-book is whatever the publisher dictates. Not that means that you have to agree with them and pay that price of course.You could just wait for a couple of months and the price of the e-book may, as is often the case with video games, reduce significantly following the initial launch period.
You could even decide to spend your hard earned dollars on something entirely different – a DVD, a video game, tickets to a concert. You could watch TV or listen to the radio instead of reading a book. Books are, for the most part, a discretionary purchase and need to compete with a number of other products and services for both your leisure time and your money. As with any other discretionary purchase, an e-book should be pitched at the price that you are willing to pay for it. Not a penny more, not a penny less.
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