eBook Prices - Is it just me…

[SkidAce]

Prices go up until profits start dropping.

Its human nature.

 

[Morrus]

Prices go up until profits start dropping.

Its human nature.

Yes. It’s called market forces and ensures people are paying what the object is worth. This is a feature not a bug, and helps ensure workers get paid what their labour is worth.

Well it doesn’t, as it never works out like that. People won’t pay what things are actually worth, and so workers remain underpaid. But that’s the idea.

 

[Clint_L]

Or do they seem to be getting ridiculous?

I primarily read on a Kindle. I had some serious bouts of retinopathy in both eyes over the years so it’s generally easier to read white text on a black background. Plus, these old eyes appreciate being able to adjust font size.

I noticed this when I was trying to backfill the Discworld series. The books jumped from roughly $8 to &15 each. What can possibly justify this jump aside from “that they can”. The series has been out for years and the paperbacks go for about $7. Eventually, I was able to pick them up for cheap thanks to a Humble Bundle.

I don’t mind paying if the book is a new release or still only available in print as a hardcover. I just find it ridiculous for the ebook to be more than a non-discounted paperback. Especially, since you don’t technically own the ebook, but rather have a perpetual license to it (and we know they can take it away anytime). It also seems like ebooks don’t go one sales that often anymore.

Unfortunately, while I have the Libby app, they rarely have the books I want to read.

What are your thoughts? Do you use an eReader and if so, how do you get your books.

I general, I pay about 40% of what I do for physical books, so no, I have not shared your experience. Discworld is an incredibly best selling series, so there are a lot of copies available out there; that probably keeps prices very low on physical copies. I mostly read new books, and they are much, much cheaper on Kindle.

I tried out their subscription service for a bit, which has tons of books available for a few bucks a month, but found that I still was mostly buying new books. However, if you are into older titles, it might be worth checking out what is on offer there.

 

[Blue]

I noticed this when I was trying to backfill the Discworld series. The books jumped from roughly $8 to &15 each. What can possibly justify this jump aside from “that they can”. The series has been out for years and the paperbacks go for about $7. Eventually, I was able to pick them up for cheap thanks to a Humble Bundle.

The prices of books have been more or less static for ages. Not actually unchanging, but close enough that they've increased slower than inflation rate for a while. We've finally been seeing adjustment, especially for mass market paperbacks from popular authors.

eBook prices when they first came out were artificially depressed to allow them to catch on, and that set expectations that they should be a lot lower in cost than paperbacks. And that's both absolutely true by removing the print and distribution costs, but not as severe as it seems because you are still getting the full content and undermining print sales by enough to make them no longer viable isn't in anyone's interest.

So eBook prices, though Amazon, have increased with the print price increases. There are still plenty of eBooks out there much cheaper. But they are usually ebook only and don't have to compete with print versions of themselves.

Now, other publishers like Kobo offer ebooks cheaper. But Amazon just took steps earlier this year disallowing download of your ebooks. You can deliver them but not download them, which prevents you from side-loading them into an eReader connected to another publisher.

Frankly, because of that I will no longer buy eBooks through Amazon. That said, they've made it easy to read their books on my Kindle, and a pain to read others to try to incentivize me. (I greatly prefer eInk for reading over a backlit screen like on phone or tablet.)

 

[The Sigil]

Yes, they absolutely are. The memo about supply and demand seems to have been mysteriously lost in the conversation about digital products. An infinite supply (which you get with digital content) should mean lower prices. Yet they're going up instead.

Perhaps this is kind of a tangent, but it has been my experience that in general, we seem to have some sort of sense when WE are the ones producing an item that "the economic value of an item should be tied to the amount of labor that went into producing it, including the sunk cost labor invested in developing the skill" and yet when we are purchasing items tend to argue that "the economic value of an item should be tied to the materials involved in producing it."

In other words, we're always interested in emphasizing the side of the equation that benefits us. I always look at something like a hand-crocheted blanket and think of the time and skill that went into it... it's many, many hours. And yet when purchasing the blanket, most people want to pay only for the value of the skein of yarn that went into it.

There is labor involved in producing a book (even a PDF). Since Gutenberg, the labor and skill involved in imprinting ink on paper and binding the paper together has been going down. But one could argue that the amount of skill required to arrange the words and letters and art together into a product others want to purchase has been going up.

So even though PDFs allow for near-infinite supply of the finished physical product analog (the PDF file), that's only part of the production equation where cost to produce has gone to zero. You don't have to pay for the paper and the binding and the printing press with a PDF. You DO still have to pay for the skill and labor of the author that wrote the book (and the editor, and artists, and layout artists, etc.)

So while you may have an "infinite supply" of one book, you don't have an "infinite supply of all possible books." And with total units sold being lower as market fragmentation increases, and value of the skill involved in production going up, the cost to produce one "template" from which your "infinite supply of copies of this particular book" can be made is increasing while the number of people demanding one of those infinite books is decreasing.

Reducing the cost of physical production to zero has helped shield us from that reality, but if it now costs more to create a creative work than it did in the past and fewer people are buying it, that tells me the price is likely to go UP.

I used to work in book publishing. It's a nightmare all around. They understand that digital means infinite supply because they require libraries only check out a book so many times before the license expires and they purchase a new copy. So clearly they get it. But that's seemingly never applied to book sales. Unless there's a bundle where you get like 30 books for $10.

This is a separate part of the equation entirely. Book publishers want to enforce artificial scarcity in a digital world, which is why they want licensing to eliminate the right of first sale* (or the non-US equivalent in other countries). But that gets into a whole different argument which is only relevant to the original post ("why are ebooks getting so expensive") in the rather trite and boring answer "because publishers are (and always have been) trying to maximize profits and will charge as much as the market will bear." (The means by which they manipulate what the market will bear are tangentially relevant to the conversation, but the WHY is more important).

* This is relevant because in the past, a physical book publisher's competition was not just "other books" it was "copies of the same book I may have previously published available on the used book market." This is less an issue in a "licensed-only" world where I cannot obtain the licensed copy of an e-book someone else has decided they are finished using.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Stop and think about what you're suggesting for just a moment.

I mean the library could buy the digital book and provide copies for anyone who wants to borrow it.

 

[Spectral Anomaly]

I mean the library could buy the digital book and provide copies for anyone who wants to borrow it.

Just a hunch, but you've never dealt with software or IP licensing of any kind, have you?

 

[Micah Sweet]

You’re suggest that a library engage in piracy?

Libraries are great. But they’re not known for breaking the law. That’s how libraries stop being “great” and become. “closed”.

I don't see how it would be piracy if the copy is controlled by the library and only accessible to any given borrower for a limited time. E-books have qualities physical books lack. Pretending otherwise seems ridiculous to me. What's wrong with using them?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Just a hunch, but you've never dealt with software or IP licensing of any kind, have you?

No, because it doesn't interest me.

 

[The Sigil]

I mean the library could buy the digital book and provide copies for anyone who wants to borrow it.

Except that's not how COPYRIGHT works. It's literally there in the name... the right to make copies.

Buying a copy of a digital book does not give me the right to make copies of that book (with certain well-defined exceptions such as the right to create a backup copy for personal use, but that would not allow me to provide copies for anyone who wants to borrow it).

Generally, libraries can only buy a license that allows a book to be "copied and displayed" on X devices at a time and must follow strict technical safeguards to ensure that the number of displayed copies at any given time is never greater than X. It's a lot like "seat licensing" for software (where you pay based on the number of people logged in at any given time instead of paying for one license per computer).