Could We Be Paying Over The Odds For E-Books

Over the last couple of years, e-books have become ever more popular. A lot of the credit for that must go to the Amazon Kindle reader which, whilst not the first e-book reader to hit the market, has undeniably been a major influence in the growth of the market for both e-book readers and the e-books that accompany them.

E-books are predicted to make up somewhere between 12 to 15% of total book sales in 2011. The market is still in an early stage, but e-books are becoming more and more important in the world of publishing. 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 might a fair price for an e-book be?

There is no paper, ink or bindings used in the production of e-books. Neither do they need to be shipped by road or rail since they are not a physical product. Therefore, they should be quite a bit cheaper than traditional print books – right?

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. E-books have the same editing, proof reading and marketing costs that conventional books do. According to many publishers, the lack of these costs is not a significant factor.

Up to a point, you can see some logic in this argument. On the other hand, if the physical aspects of a book don’t impact upon the price, why would there be any significant difference between the price of a hardback edition and a paperback? The argument appears somewhat spurious.

Amazon had a policy of pricing e-books at $9.99 or less until recently. Until they had a disagreement with some of the major publishing houses that is. One publisher’s books were briefly withdrawn from Amazon’s site at one point.

Many publishers have now adopted the agency pricing model. That means that the publishers dictate the selling price rather than the retailer. You might, 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 flagging up the fact that they did not fix 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). Neither can you sell it to a second hand book store, donate it to a local library or a charity shop. In summary, you have fewer options than you would have with a standard, print edition. So, given that e-books have fewer options, the price should also be lower.

Right now, the price of an e-book is whatever the publisher says it should be. If you don’t agree with them, you always have the option of not buying the book of course. You could simply wait a month or two and e-book prices may, as is the case with video games, fall quite a bit just a few weeks after the initial launch.

You might even elect to spend your hard earned cash on something completely different – a video game, a DVD, tickets to a concert. Instead of reading a book you might just watch TV. At the end of the day, books are a discretionary purchase which need to compete with other products and services for both your time and your cash. In fact, an e-book should cost whatever you are prepared to pay for it. It’s up to you to decide what it’s worth.