I started out talking about Ed Gizmo’s Pirate Face parody of Lady Gaga and got into Brand Gamblin’s contribution to Nathan Lowell Presents. Looking at the wave form in Audacity this morning, it looks like quite a rant!
[Edit note: I walked too close to a dog at around minute 5 in the audio and clipped the resulting sound spike out of the file.]
Yesterday’s Word Count: 0
Today’s Starting Count: 11,674
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
When I see an ebook price that’s higher than the paperback price, trying to guess the publisher has become a kind of game. So far about 7 out of 10 of these books (that I’ve come across) are published by Penguin/Riverhead. It almost feels like they hate their authors. Are they trying to force a movement back to paper? Do they somehow think that this will make them more money? They should have enough price-point data to know otherwise, or is it just simply a serious case of head-in-sand?
I’d really like to know if reasonably priced ebooks actually increases publisher’s income by making up for sales that would have been lost to used books. On the other hand, when I see the ebook is more expensive than the paperback, the used books call out to me.
The ebook pricing is based on a theory of market cannibalization. They price the ebooks in a way that they won’t eat away the paperbacks. It also reinforces their preconceived notion that ebooks are not profitable because they sell fewer of them.
My thinking is that they offer them as a convenience … but do not really view the ebook as a viable medium as it is. They’re positioning themselves for the “enhanced ebook” and missing the main point that they’re in the entertainment business. Their product is not the book but rather the story.
I could be wrong, but that’s what it looks like.
I’m begining to suspect that the cannibalization is over and done with the moment someone gets an ereader. The publishers have already lost that “paper” reader. If they want get into that channel of customers, they need to provide the book in the format the reader wants (at a reasonable price.)
I think you are right. Plus I think that some of them may think that for ebook readers, the ebook is a premium; providing more features than the print copy. Why shouldn’t people pay more for it?
Of course that doesn’t maximize profitability, but why would they want to do that? *sigh*
ebook prices really get me going. I absolutely cannot buy an ebook for more than $9.99 (I’ve seen one listed as high as $23!), and even at that price I only purchase under the most extreme of conditions.
When shopping for new ebooks to read, what I used to do was go back to books I have already read and scan the “people also bought” ribbon (unfortunately I am to the point where these lead me in a continuous loop to other books I have already read). When I got to that point I tried searching through all of the sci-fi (or whatever genre) kindle books, but trying to find anything that way is a train wreck. I just can’t believe how limited the options are that Amazon provides for filtering through ebooks. Still, I persevered and checked through all (or at least most) of books available under the sci-fi genre. Now every month I just look through the sci-fi ebooks released in the last 30 days. The up side here is that I have to look through only a few hundred titles, but the down side is that I’ve never heard of most of them and they probably don’t have any/many reviews yet. Hurray for samples…
Now we’re getting to what I really wanted to talk about–prices! I keep a large backlog of samples on my kindle. I categorize them by genre and price. So I have a folder titled “<$5 Science Fiction Samples," another for "$5-7 Science Fiction Samples," and one for "$9+ Science Fiction Samples," and so on for other genres. The less than $5 folder is my go-to. I haven't purchased anything from the other folders since I started categorizing by price several months ago, even though there are some books in there that I really do want to read.
On a side note, it seems like historical fiction is the most over-priced genre. I don't recall ever seeing one priced less than $7.99, while most are $9.99, and a significant portion up at $11.
One of the things about this pricing that drives me crazy is that there’s usually a good used copy of the book availiable for less than a dollar plus shipping. I’ll just order that instead of paying $13 for the ebook. It’s a bit like “If you want me to buy a paper copy, fine, I’ll just do that!”
I’ve just started playing around with Goodreads.com, and their recommendation engine. I find it’s a lot easier to work with than Amazon’s, and I’ve had some good results. A huge number of books that I’ve no interest in to be sure, but it has turned up several books I’ve never noticed before. I did end up going through a bunch of their lists such as “best books of the 20th century” to find books I’d read but forgotten about. This did a lot to help freshen up the recommendations.