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E-book payback, costs and more
February 6, 2009 | 3:06 pm
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By Paul Biba
Nice posting by Frances Turner on his blog L’Ombre del l’Olivier. He says lots more than this little bit, so take a look.
Reading an ebook on a smartphone or a netbook means that you can ignore the reader cost. It doesn’t work for everyone and the battery life of an LCD screen means that you do tend to be tied to electrical outlets. Low power dedicated readers like the Kindle, Sony and Cybook are basically three times the price they need to be to get mass market traction but I anticipate prices will drop because the only expensive element is the screen. Everything else is about $10-$20 of bog standard components so once prices of screens fall (and they will because there are competing lower power technologies) the ebook reader prices will also fall. Of course in order for it to make sense for people to buy ebooks the book price also has to fall. Morons like Harper Collins who charge hard cover prices simply lose my business.
A note about payback, using myself as an example. I buy – primarily – books from Webscriptions. I just checked and I bought about 120 books last year (depending on how you count duplicates and eARCs) for a total of $381 which works out at less than $3.20 per book**. If I bought all those in paperback for the standard $6.99 – and some would be HC only or more expensive trade paperback – I’d be paying $838.80 for the privilege. The nominal $458 I saved easily paid for my Cybook. I mentioned eARCs above; I was able to read a bunch of books in eARC form (six at $15 each in 2008) before they became available anywhere else. Excluding the eARCs my expenditure fell to under $300 for 120 books, an average of $2.50 each.
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Comments:
Actually what I liked the most was the post
“Harper Collins are STILL Clueless Morons” linked there.
Not that anyone interested in e-books does not know it, but it’s good to see the reasons why HC are clueless on ebooks explained relatively patiently and point to point.
I recently wrote HarperCollins about the disparate pricing of the recently released fantasy novel by Fiona McIntosh. I faced the same problem Turner did with HC. On its website HC said the book was available in both pbook and ebook for $7.99. I tried to buy the ebook but couldn’t. Eventually, HC gave me a link to the ebook but the price was $14.99 (discounted to $11.99). I wrote and asked about the pricing and was told that they appreciated my concern and would pass on the information.
I asked HC to let me know when the ebook would be available for the $7.99 + the 20% discount. I also said it made no sense for me to pay more for an ebook I didn’t own because of DRM than for a pbook that I did own and that if the pricing was not at least comparable, I would not buy the book in any version. To this I received absolutely no response.
Unfortunately, the real loser is the author Fiona McIntosh. I have found that once I am thwarted in buying an author’s book, I tend to move on and forget about the author altogether, which means I stop buying the author’s books. I suspect other readers are the same, especially with the increasing number of authors one can choose among.
Baen is an example of a non-clueless publisher. I buy a significant number of books from them because of thier track record of reliability, and their lack of DRM. Since I tend to buy ala carte, I wind up paying $3-7 for thier paperback-equivalent ebooks.
I have no problem with this. An ebook and a mass-market-paperback are probably similar in overall value and cost. [1]
It is amusing that “great literature” is free from Project Gutenberg, and publishers like Harper-Collins wants $$$ for “garbage”. Quotes reflect the views of the literati, not the author.
Yes, I read mostly garbage. My English-major son and sister assure me of that. 
Regards,
Jack Tingle
[1] The cost of printing, physical distribution, and returns are probably similar to the cost of conversions, servers, and tech support. Both are cheap compared to editorial, marketing, and royalty costs.