Secondly, I think our industry is treating the e-book opportunity as nothing more than a way to generate additional income from the print content. Most e-books available today are nothing more than quickie conversions from print to e. As long as that’s all we’re doing, yes, I agree that we need to settle for lower e-prices vs. the print price. But why settle for that?

I’ve been told that the earliest TV shows were nothing more than radio programs in front of a camera. It apparently took awhile for the TV execs to realize they should take advantage of the medium. That’s precisely where we are with e-books today. They’re just print versions on an electronic device. Every book won’t lend itself to this, but think how much richer the customer experience can be when we start leveraging the capabilities of a sophisticated e-device. I look forward to the day when we’re past this radio-programs-in-front-of-a-TV camera era!

For example, I’m finishing off an e-book (will be a physical book too for those who prefer this) right now on how to sell your property in this really difficult market world-wide. So I can charge more while the demand is bound to be high. As time marches on and the property market picks up (being cyclical, it always does – eventually!), the price of the e-book will need to fall or I will add even more bonuses in to create greater value.

Difficult to top the current value though as we’re offering free tickets to win one of our properties!

The beauty of the online delivery of books is that it’s easy to adjust price and to add in various bonuses to boost sales by creating greater value for the consumer. A win-win!

Kind regards,

Vinden Grace

PS. When the book launches later this month, I’ll post the URL here for those whoa re interested in how I’ll market this.

Once distributors wake up to the fact that fixed prices are no longer mandatory, we can expect to see all kinds of deals; and the price of every book will decline slowly over time as the market reaches saturation at a particular price. (We can see already with computer games.)

Ultimately the idea of books having a fixed price will become just as antiquated and charming as the idea of paying a fixed price for an air ticket from New York to London.

Nothing, if you like the current “cheap cell phone with a contract that works out to thousands of dollars” model.

However, there’s a reason why I have a pay-go phone. If times get hard (it does happen sometimes), I can back the heck off using the phone and reduce its cost to near zero.

Ditto on the Kindle. I paid the full original price for mine and I’m not whining about it, but yes, I expect the content to be inexpensive–because it’s not subsidizing anything. And if times get hard I simply content myself with free public domain books.

Think that would work with your contract-model reader?

So if you like the contract model, go for it. (Once you’ve done the math to figure out what it will cost you over the life of the contract, and verfied that you will have a job for that time.) But I hope to goodness that there remain some pay-go models for people like me. And if that means waiting to use my Christmas money to buy the reader, I am totally cool with that.

I am sure that all the books you help sell-including your very own- have nothing to do with your views on content pricing. I will say it time and time again: e-books must be cheaper than print books. It takes less ability and resources to create an e-book. Wise publishers will follow Catarina’s example and establish online supply lines that are separated from their normal supply lines. This way they don’t have to worry about cannibalizing their own hardcover sales. Simply editing and formatting submissions can result in a win situation for all parties involved.Nothing personal Joe, but if Bezos has publicly stated that the 9.99 model is sustainable, I am going to have to side with him.

Any vendors should be able to sell readers, all with standardized functions plus whatever optional features they choose, so consumers can optimize their reading experience by choosing the device that’s best for them.

Vendors like Amazon should only be concerned with making sure their content can be read on the standardized readers. They shouldn’t have to base book pricing models on how much the reader cost… that’s an artificial connection. They should base their costs on the actual costs to produce and disseminate the e-books, period.

Amazon’s branching out into other hardware, like the iPhone and the PC, is a much better choice for all concerned, because it begins to remove the proprietary nature of the selling process, and opens up the possibilities of using the hardware of your choice to read the content. They are better off doing this, farming out manufacture and selling of the Kindle to a third party, and allowing themselves to price e-books according to their real costs, not the artificial connections to devices.

You want to go to a model where I pay more for the same thing than I do now? How is that smarter?

There is *everything* to dislike about this model. Guess I’ll be keeping my Sony 505 until they pry it from my cold dead hands if this ever becomes reality.

For the same reason I choose not to buy a $1500-3000 cell phone. A $70 phone at $8-12 per month is a much better deal than a free phone at $50/mo.

My $150 refurb Kindle at $0-20/mo will always be much cheaper than any “free” e-reader plan someone can come up with.

IT. IS. EARLY. IN. THE. GAME.
(If it were a baseball game, we’d be in the top of the third inning at most.)
Don’t panic.
Breathe.
All will be well in the end.

Just need to remember that the future is not the present with a different calendar. Are current ebook readers pricy? Limited in features? Functionality? Duh! Yes. So what else is new? All new gadget categories start out that way. Give it time.

Tech gadgets all share two features; they get better with time and they get cheaper.
Remember the first cellphones? The old shoulder-slung bricks? Now compare that to a contemporary flip phone like the Razr or the new Droid. Or compare an early Rio MP3 player:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300
To a Zune HD:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune_HD
That’s what a decade in gadget-time will do; a thousand-fold improvement in capacity and several generations worth of refinements and extension of capability.

The first kindle came out two years ago at $399.
Now you can get better readers at half the price.
Give it another two years (18 months is more likely) and you’ll see another halving in price to $99.
Give it a bit more after that and you’ll see blister-pack models at drugstores. (Moore’s law of semiconductor pricing seems to apply to ebook gadgets. Nice, huh?)

It has happened before; it’ll happen again.

The money is in the books, not the gadget. No secret there. But the money is to be found in volume, not in gouging customers. That is why Amazon quickly moved Kindle-the-platform to iPhone and is now bringing it to PCs; to build up the customer base and book volume. (And note that Kindle, properly speaking, is *not* a gadget but rather a delivery system for selling ebooks. The kindle platform is the software and the services, not the gadget. The gadget is just the tip of the iceberg.)

The real issue about ebook pricing is that consumers see it as a replacement for paperbacks (reasonable enough as that is the pre-existing high-volume delivery vehicle for books) while publishers see it as cannibalizing hardcover sales (short-term true but long-term stupid; hardcover sales go to libraries and dedicated upscale readers, the same folks that are early ebook gadget adopters. But they neglect to factor in phone-, PDA-, and PC-based readers. And future mainstream–paperback–buyers moving to ebooks.).

What is going to happen, naturally, despite all the Big Publishing House efforts to the contrary, is that Kindles and Sonys and Nooks are going to set the foundation for a high-volume ebook infrastructure that will transcend the delivery vehicle, whether it be an electronic gadget or dead tree pulp. We are in a transition phase but eventually it will become clear to all that a book is, and always has been, information. The bound paper is just the transmission medium. Once you liberate the Platonic ideal of a book from the solid object, you free it to find its true audience and true market and true price. Some books may well be worth more than $10 to their natural audience; most will be worth less. A lot will be found to be worth essentially zero (Sturgeon’s Law).

We just need to get past this whole one size-fits-all thinking. Given that most current mainstream paperbacks run US$7 or so and most hardcovers run around $20, a baseline of $9.99 as a *starting point* is a fair compromise until the business builds up enough volume and stratification that we can see books properly priced on individual merit. Lost in all the hype about the $9.99 baseline is that ebook prices already vary significantly, which they should. And it should be no shock that if you look for volume sales, the volume lies in the lower prices. And yes, people love free. Focusing on that is just focusing on the smoke obscuring the reality of ever-increasing ebook sales volume and the reality that it is pbook overhead and legacy costs that are hurting the BPH’s, not ebooks.
The reality is that the ebook ecosystem is ramping up nicely without need for any market distortions (aka, subsidies). New competitors are jumping in, new consumers are committing to the new distribution channels, volume is building up. Smart publishers are moving to position themselves to better survive in the new age. Stupid BPH’s aren’t. Before anybody notices, all the hand-wringing about baseline prices will be a moot point: The dinosaurs will be gone and history will be written by smaller, nimbler mammals and published electronically.

Just give it time.
And enjoy the ride.

But let’s say that the device maker teams up with a publisher or publishing cartel, and the device is temptingly cheap, because it is subsidized. And the unsuspecting public is duped into thinking that ‘ebooks are cheaper than “real” books’ because, we all believe that ebooks ought to be cheaper. Then the public is rudely awakened.

But wait! the device reads industry standard epub files! So we can expect a flourishing market in bootleg epub editions, and owners can rediscover the joy of older (public domain) books via Google books and archive.org. So then we have a company losing money on the device, and not selling books in the bargain.

But wait! the device does NOT read epub files without DRM. And it reads no other file formats — you are locked into the content provided by the cartel that is subsidizing the device. OK, that looks like a winner … except TeleRead, and every blog on the planet, screams bloody murder. And they publish usage studies comparing the cost of buying the subsidized reader, and so many books a year, to simply buying the paperbound editions at discounted prices. And lo and behold! the added costs of the device (even subsidized) make that model more costly, because the books are not any cheaper, they are exactly the same price as the discounted paperbound books all us hardcore readers enjoy.

So then we get more cost, less utility.

Sorry, this model just won’t make it out of any company’s research, unless the company is desperate or foolish; it will then fail spectacularly and serve as an object lesson to all others in the publishing industry.

This would greatly increase the revenue to publishers and solve some of the industry’s problems, at least temporarily, as regards the demands from Amazon.