But I could buy the dead tree for that!

[lexin]

The price of ebooks. Yes.

I was looking today at Waterstones web site, hoping to find interesting and worthwhile ebooks for the beloved Sony reader which never leaves my side. Dear friends, Waterstones are crap. And people from outside the US/Canada can't buy from the Sony bookstore. I don't know why, you'd think our money would be as good as anybody's, but we can't.

Worse than their choice, for which no better word exists than 'abysmal', ebooks that I'd buy from them, just to have a copy by my side while I'm travelling, cost as much as, and sometimes more than, the dead tree version. Case in point, The Hobbit is £5.49 (a discount on the list price of £6.99), but the dead tree version is £4.19 – though its list price is also £6.99, the discount they offer is larger. Take also Lindsey Davis's newest book, Alexandria, £12.14 in the dead tree (hardback) version, but a whopping £17.47 in the ebook version. Even the list price of the ebook version is more over £21 as opposed to £18. Needless to say, I didn't buy it.

Thank goodness for Fictionwise and for smaller publishers. If I bought bestsellers I'd be even more seriously peeved than I already am.

Comments

[graculus.livejournal.com]

It's the whole issue around DRM and the pricing of ebooks that stops me getting any form of reader. Thank heavens, however, also for Tor and Suvudu, both of which have been putting up free science fiction and fantasy books...

http://www.tor.com/ (you have to join to download)
http://www.suvudu.com/

[m31andy.livejournal.com]

Also ... (http://www.baen.com/)

[lexin.livejournal.com]

Brilliant, thanks to both of you. Free books are always good.

[m31andy.livejournal.com]

BTW - the url I gave you was *supposed* to have a name. You probably know by now that it's Baen and I also heartily support their Websubscription service - $4.00 for the older titles, ($6.00 for larger compendiums, $9 for new titles)

However, before you start shelling out cash, give me a shout and I'll dig out a disc I've got somewhere with a selection of the back titles on - Baen occasionally gives one away free with a new hardback book. You're welcome to browse it.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

I understand the Sony bookstore issue ... when an author sells the rights to a book, it's usually done by territory ... so I'll sell the UK rights to, say, Pan UK and the US rights to Simon & Schuster or someone ... depending on the contract, that may include hardback, paperback and ebook versions.

If the ebook for the US has already been sold, and it was possible to just buy it cheaply from the UK, why would any UK publisher pay for the UK ebook rights? (Much the same as the region coding on DVDs)

I said I understood it, not that I agreed with it though :-)

But why ebooks should be more expensive to buy is pretty much a total mystery to me. Sure there's the electronic store to set up etc. but most of these retailers already sell dead tree versions over the internet so the credit card charges etc. are already met, and it can't cost *that* much for the bandwidth surely?

[cobrabay.livejournal.com]

In a way it is going further than the region coding on DVDs, after all amazon.com does not stop me buying a Region 1 DVD and having it shipped to the UK.
I have to admit, in a couple of cases where I specifically wanted ebook versions of a particular book because I didn't have the fork-lift required to carry the dead tree editions (Neal Stephenson I am looking at you) I ended up buying the dead tree version, and downloaded a pirate copy of the ebook.

[lexin.livejournal.com]

and downloaded a pirate copy of the ebook.

I have "Lord of the Rings" on that basis. I've bought not one but two dead tree copies of LotR in two different covers and I think Christopher Tolkien has enough of my money. For a very reasonable price I'd buy an ebook version, but I won't spend what they're charging.

[m31andy.livejournal.com]

And don't forget the authors who don't seem to understand that the ebook revolution is definitely on its way.

*cough*Rowling*cough*

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Amazon may not, but some other e-tailers have prevented selling region 1 disks outside of Region 1. I also think they I have tried to buy a specific Region 1 disc from Amazon US and been refused, but I can't remember what disc it was or if it was actually Amazon, as it's been ages since it happened.

As I understand things, a DVD distributor can restrict who they will supply, and so can issue a contract that includes a "will not sell out of region" clause. Of course once someone has bought a Region 1 DVD in the US, they are then allowed to resell it, including to people outside the US ... so I guess it is in the contract between the ebook publisher and Amazon.

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

While I was living in New Zealand, there was a particular BBC DVD I wanted, so I tried to order it from the BBC shop. They refused to ship it outside the EU (or perhaps a slightly different area) so I ended up buying it from Amazon UK instead.

[julesjones]

One of the costs is the DRM licence, which is not cheap if you are a major publisher. (Nor if you're a small press, which is part of why a lot of the small press publishers, including mine, have decided that paying for DRM is paying out money in order to annoy your honest readers while doing little to deter the dishonest ones.)

The commercial grade bandwidth and server space actually *is* a significant cost to small press epublishers, at least according to some of the tech people at those publishers. Dunno what it's like for the likes of MacMillan.

[lexin.livejournal.com]

But surely the bandwidth can't be the issue with Waterstones? I mean, I presume they're not doing their web page on the cheap.

[julesjones]

You wouldn't think so, given the amount of cruft on the average commercial webpage.

One of the interesting things to look at is the price of the small press books compared with the price of the major publishers' wares in ebook format. Small press print books are generally significantly more expensive than mass market print books -- economies of scale are a major influence on the production cost per unit of a book. And a lot of the fixed costs in producing a dead tree title are the same in epublishing (editing, proof-reading), and the per unit costs are swapped out for equivalent costs (the aforementioned heavy duty hosting rather than printing) that might be lower but are not non-existent. Nevertheless, in small press, the somewhat lower production costs are reflected in a significantly lower price for ebook than trade paperback -- often down to the price of a mass market paperback, even though they have nowhere near mass market economies of scale. The big publishers -- well, they seem to mostly price ebooks at the same price as hardbacks, even after the mass market paperback has been released. :-/

[aliciajd]

I've had my Kindle for 4 months and am totally addicted. But the price of current ebooks is really criminal. At least the older books like the complete Sherlock Holmes are very cheap or even free. But I paid $9.99 last week for daVinci Code when the paper back would have only been $7.99. Of course by the time I paid postage on it, it would have been a wash. But still... This has got to get better soon. Because I can tell you, I'm through with collecting and moving rooms full of books.