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Near-depression be damned! WSJ price grab ahead? Plus Aaron Pressman’s gripe against ScrollInflation books
June 9, 2009 | 6:36 am
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By David Rothman
A pattern here? Rupert Murdoch and friends want the Wall Street Journal to cost more, and for his other properties on the Web to start charging. And we already know about the sneaky news summit that media barons held in Chicago, with dollar signs in their eyes, even if anti-trust risks may loom ahead.
Not to be left behind, some in the the book industry keeps hoping they can use ScrollMotion apps to jack up e-book prices—a fantasy, even if ScrollMotion can improve the interfaces of its Iceberg e-reader. Aaron Pressman, meanwhile, has documented the gaps between the prices of various ScrollMotion books and editions of the same titles in other formats.
Of all the price-raising initiatives, the one for the WSJ seems most likely to succeed, given the paper’s popularity among the expense-account crowd. But steep charges in time for “normal” daily papers? That’ll be interesting to see. Same applies to the ScrollMotion novels, which must compete not just against other e-books but other media, regardless of the technical wrinkles that ScrollMotion may add.
Look, I want the media to make money, and I, of all people, am aware of the limits of the ad-supported model. While I can see $3 or $5 e-books, I believe that $1 titles could be overdoing it even in a depression or near-depression. But can news conglomerates and book publishers really gouge their way to prosperity at this, of all times? Better to focus on traditional editorial values and on innovations to improve content and presentation, while trimming back expenses. Needless to say, in many cases involving books, a well-stocked national digital library system could also help.
About the books shown above: Here are prices I found at BooksOnBoard (no other stores tried as SM alternatives): Priceless Memories, $9.99; Angels and Demons, $7.99; 101 Important Things You Need to Know Before You Have a Baby, $7.99; 4th of July, $9.99. In fairness to ScrollMotion, Amazon is a special example since it’s subsidizing the books, and at least one of the titles, Priceless Memories, is also outrageously priced in the 20s at other e-stores. Still, given the value that ScrollMotion subtracts from from e-books via DRM and its proprietary eBabel, we’re not talking about bargains here, in general. In paper, for example, Priceless Memories costs just $16.49 new from Amazon in paper.
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Comments:
Thanks for the link! The WSJ and other newspaper stuff is also important. And in the realm of price hikes on digital goods, don’t forget Apple raising the price of iTunes music for most songs sold by 30% in April. And eMusic “agreeing” to a big price hike on all its subscribers in return for access to Sony Music’s back catalog. Sirius XM says it’s raising the price of its satellite radio plans by $2 each in August too.
When considering, ‘How low should ebook prices go?’ I think the proper comparison is to the cheap, pulp-paper, fall-apart, mass-market paperbacks.
Not the mass-market paperbacks of today, but of yesteryear.
Then take those prices and chart along the ‘official’ inflation rates.
Now of course, when you bought a mass-market paperback in 1962, you were getting a lot more than you get today in an ebook encumbered with DRM and readable only on one device, something you can’t share or resell, something that in all likelihood you won’t even be able to read in 20 years, or maybe 10 years.
I do note a largish sampling of under-a-dollar ebooks on the Kindle store, for example.
Now in addition to considering the retail price of the ebook of today vs the paperback of yore, we should also consider how much in royalties the author of these might be getting. So how would the author’s per-copy royalty on that 25-cent paperback compare with his modern counterpart’s royalty on that 99-cent ebook? And does that chart along with the inflation of the past 50 years?
With all the journalists that the WSJ and other papers are throwing onto the breadlines these days, I suspect that we have yet to see just how ‘low’ authors will be willing to go, just to bring in some extra dollars.