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Scary e-book price for Stephen King’s latest: $35 list
October 21, 2009 | 3:39 pm
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By David Rothman
That’s no typo—Stephen King’s latest book will list for $35 as an e-book. Worse, King’s book won’t haunt the stores until December 24, a month after the hardback goes on sale. Is the guy a masochist? Do he and Scribner’s want to be pirated?
Recommending reading for both: French survey: 95 percent of pirated e-books are NOT online legally. You can bet that some of King’s loyal fans will not wait a month for the E version. Gary Price notes that you can preorder the p-book version for $9—obviously part of The Great Price War. All the more reason why e-bookers may feel ripped off.
Look, I can appreciate King’s genuine concern for p-bookstores. But is this really the solution, when so often e-books are reaching people who wouldn’t buy p-books anyway?
Related: Google news roundup. and New York Times story.
Technorati Tags: Scribner’s,Simon & Schuster
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Comments:
This is definately the kind of thing that encourages people to pirate. Most people’s moral compass tends to be based around common sense and an instinctive idea of what is fair rather than legalistic precision.
So, most people believe that an author should be compensated but they also believe that ebooks, being almost completely free of production and distribution costs, should cost less than print books. This type of greed and control will simply make readers feel justified when they grab that scanned and OCRed copy of Mr. King’s book one day after the hardcover is released.
I think this is an experiment. The publisher wants to see just how far they can push the ebook prices. If you’re truly appalled by the high price, don’t buy and don’t grab a pirate copy, wait until the price drops to a reasonable range, then get it. If you have to wait a year until the paperback comes out, then just read something else while waiting for you’re price point. If, by some strange reason, the price never drops into your range, then don’t read the book at all.
The idea of the high price justifying piracy is an idea of an intellectual twelve year old.
I think Stephen King and his publisher are just asking for piracy of his new book. Oh well, if you screw over your customers, you’ll get it right back.
I thought King was smarter than this. Very disappointing.
Definitely won’t take long for that one to be available for nothing, scanned or otherwise.
Lots more people now will be getting ereaders etc. with all the new ones – hope the publisher is reading for the hate mail – they are going to cop quite a bit!
Greg,
Only a 12 year would be as out of touch with reality as you suggest. This might be the limits of the logic development of some media executives, too.
Experimenting is one thing – deliberately pricing products to sell fewer and make you less money is stupid.
i don’t have a problem waiting until the price comes down on this one. i’ve got enough neal stephenson sitting in front of me to keep me busy for a *good* long time. and i’ve got ulysses, jonathan strange & mr. norrell, and just a pile of work by all kinds of other authors named different things than ‘stephen king’.
and if the price never does come down, i won’t have to pay for it at all. you know, we still have those library-thingies. or i might just never get around to it at all. ‘popular’ doesn’t equal ‘important’.
Amazon sales it for 9$ for its Kindle:
http://www.amazon.com/Under-Dome-Novel-Stephen-King/
Actually I read it wrong, its 9$ on pre-order of the hardcopy
The list price is meaningless of course.
I do wonder though how many folks that really want to read King’s latest will just wait for the ebook rather than buying the hardcover on release day?
Perhaps the publishers experiment here will provide the answers they want.
This reminds me of some laws that were passed back in the very late 19th century and early 20th century that regulated the use of automobiles. My favorite was the one that required someone to walk one mile ahead of a car to warn others that the car was coming. Obviously such laws were designed to protect horses which along with walking and maybe cycling was how most people got around. It didn’t work then and it is not going to work now.
Publishers need to accept the fact that nothing they are going to do is going to stop, or even slow the growth of ebooks. Their number one priority should be figuring out how they can keep ebook readers being customers as opposed to illegal downloaders.
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Bill
Anyone want to run a pool on how long it takes to show up for free?
I have owned (and loved) every book of Stephen Kings since I first read Christine at the age of 13. My grandmother for years bought me stacks of his books for Christmas until she passed away 8 years ago. My collection was very complete until recently when I parted with some of it at a garage sale. I am afraid though if Mr King cant get his publisher to get a flipping clue I wont ever likely purchase another one of his works.
$35 a copy for something with NO distribution cost and no production cost after the first copy is OBSCENE! Sorry but there is no way I will ever pay a price like this for an ebook.
I agree it will probably be pirated. But it would have been even if a legal, well-priced ebook was available, as was The Lost Symbol.
Back in the old days, if we couldn’t afford a hardback price or didn’t want to pay it, we simply waited for the paperback edition to come out. Will the ebook price be reduced when a paperback version is available? Perhaps we readers need to relearn the virtue of patience.
All that being said, if Amazon can reduce the hardback price to $9, why can’t they reduce the price of the ebook edition? And that goes for any retailer.
Stephen King is no neophyte. He did “Riding the Bullett” and “The Plant” as early ebook-experiments and even had the guts to cancel the latter when it didn’t bring in enough cash.
So I propose the notion that King is actually quite clever with the pricing of his new book. It ist a sure bestseller, so it is a fair bet, that Amazon will carry it – at their usual 9.99$ price tag. Since they compensate the publisher and author based on the list price minus whatever discount they get, they will lose money on this deal.
But they neither can skip an author such as King nor change their price point on bestsellers without a massive loss of face.
It is nice to see a publisher (and author – I bet King had a word in the pricing) standing up to Amazons dominance by using their ubiquity as a lever to get back at them.
It will be interesting to see, how this plays out.
How does this differ from Stephen King’s Night Shift, The Shining, Salem’s Lot, and Carrie, which are also $32-$35? Fictionwise says they are from Random House/DoubleDay. I bought them at Fictionwise with a 100% micropay rebate, but I wouldn’t buy any of them without a big discount of some sort.
do they pirate music? do they pirate movies? Yes. well the time when books will be pirated is coming. But so what? All this new technologies are sweeping every business. With a free copy, maybe people will read more online. Publishing business will have to cut big time. It will balance out the same, look. A published book in print the writer keeps 15% and publishing house keeps about 85%. With ebooks, the writer keeps practically keeps up to 80%. So whether they pirate or not, the writer will balance out fine.
Greg – I suspect you are right on the money. This is an attempt to see how many sales can be leveraged in the first month or two of the launch of a major writers new book at a very high price.
But as Blue Tyson says, it is majorly insane .. it is inevitably going to incense many eBook reading King fans and lead to a new surge of illegal downloading.
Imho this is quite similar (well, sort of ..) to one of the arguments about legalising pot. Buying pot exposes ordinary and normally law abiding people to scummy drug dealers causing them to be tempted to move to stronger drugs. This pricing policy will drive people who would not previously have considered downloading, to enter the dark side. And once their … hmmmmm.