17
votes
eBooks cost too much
$14 USD for new novels. $10 for novels from the 1970s, riddled with OCR errors.
Yes, I know you aren't paying for the "paper", you are paying for the content.
Yes, I know authors and people who work for publishers need to pay rent. I know servers cost money. Those costs and reasonable profits are more than covered several times over in eBook prices.
That’s not how pricing works. It’s about the overall scale of how much people want the product, with cost being a factor of course.
If sales are good, then it’s priced where it should.
And that's why piracy is pretty much the only countervailing force against bad pricing and industry practices.
Otherwise publishers just presume that it's because the work sucks.
Why is it bad pricing? If anything, books have immense competition right now. Most you g people would probably rather doomscroll TikTok for free.
Well, for one, an ebook sacrifices your ability to resell it when you're done with it. This alone should justify a halving of cost.
Arbitrary example: Stephen King's "You Like It Darker", released in May. List price is $30, but less than 6 months later it's available for $21, while the ebook is still $15. Physical books less than a year old are often sold new for less than the price of the ebook. Part of that is because there is a healthy used market. The fact that books can still be profitable at that price point shows just how much of a ripoff ebooks are. Let's say that the $16 difference in retail price is just due to the unit cost per book, which according to publishers justifies $14 for the content.
I would argue that because of the loss of the right of first sale, which for many goods roughly translates to half cost, a reasonable price for a brand-new ebook is on the order of $8.
And that may or may not be actually reasonable, as that is a subjective take. But I really have no legitimate option which would be taken seriously to tell the publisher "hey, the primary reason I didn't buy this book is because it's overpriced given the loss of my rights as a consumer". I just don't buy it.
This happens for videogames too. "Oh nobody bought the new game. It must have been because the game was crap, not because of all the other possible reasons people might not have bought the game."
And to be clear: I don't really pirate videogames anymore. The only time I really ever pirate books is if I bought the physical copy and just want easy access to it when I'm away from home, or if I've borrowed it from the library and needed to return it before I finished it. But publishers don't believe in fair use, so me pirating the digital copy while reading the physical copy legitimately is the only way to send a price signal that wouldn't get conflated as "just a not-interested customer."
Like you said, that’s subjective. Personally, a physical book is a major demerit for me, since the practicalities of space matter more to me. It’s practically impossible to comfortably read some fiction novels with how comically large they’ve gotten. Not to mention the ability to adjust font, font size, and layout on ebooks
Personally, I’d pay a price premium for the ebook version.
You don’t buy it. That’s how you tell them. Buy the physical instead if you prefer it. Buy ebooks priced below the threshold for you personally.
Pirating it sends the exact same signal, it’s just a selfish and harmful way to have your cake and eat it.
There are ebooks that are not DRM locked and still don't really have a price drop because people on average are not technical enough to "reuse" digital media.
Not to stick my - into a hornet nest, but isn't this one of the few selling points of NFTs that actually makes any sense? DRM locking digital goods and allowing transfer of ownership or usage by digital certificates to other people in many secondhand markets? It makes a lot of sense to me, but to be honest I haven't put the time into understanding much about crypto and how that all that works.
Eh kinda?
So first off, reselling of ANY good is pretty trivial without verification. You have no digital trail when you sell (or loan/give) a book to a friend, and you could do the same thing with a non DRM file (and of course could just copy it to them).
The DRM file has a key that you use to unlock it, but then they have to try and keep the key from being copied or some other verification.
You can also "move" using keys or databases to confirm things. Key A is assigned to person Z, so when person Y opens it, it fails.
Crypto (and sorta kinda nft) is just doing this without the database(kinda). Instead you have a distributed ledger with 1000s of people who confirm that ledger is correct. If 1000 people say that person Z transferred key A to person Y, then they did.
I'm abstracting and skipping a lot. At the end of the day the issue is verification because they want an actual transfer that's verified rather than a copy. Traditional market transactions already cover it, it's just that they want a digital asset to behave like a physical one, so they use verification instead.
I guess it depends on where you're getting your ebooks and how they're priced. I have one out for $4.99 on Amazon, and when I made it available, it was making me about as much as the paperback book, which is priced at $14.99.
Personally, I tend to get most of my ebooks from the library because I'm not attached to owning them.
I try to get eBooks from my library, but my library does not have much. I tried Interlibrary Loan through HooplaDigital, but they don't do eInk eBooks.
Part of the reason that library ebook selections suck is because they're drastically unaffordable compared to physical books. Every checkout costs the library extra money, and libraries operate on shoestring budgets.
It's trivial for new physical books to get donated to libraries when somebody buys a new copy then finishes it. It's impossible for an ebook license to be transferred as such.
Wait libraries pay everytime I check out a book on Libby??
My understanding is that ebooks at libraries can only be checked out a certain number of times before the library is required to pay the publisher again. So effectively, yes.
In my location (Germany) it works like this for most media:
There's varying licenses so that both the maximum amount of concurrent loans as well as the actual copies checked out can factor into the payment. This makes sense because loan patterns vary widely across works. For instance a long novel might get checked out just once for 30 days by a single user who reads it all while a technical dictionary may be returned the same day, but is used by 30 different people over the course of 30 days to read just a page or two.
Just part of the reality of what things like Libby have wrought
Well, no. It's part of the reality of what publishers lobbying against libraries digitizing their physical works and lending those copies out.
Libraries invented the ebook, publishers fought their existence tooth and nail. Never forget that.
Libby has made it fundamentally economically impractical for the old model of libraries to work with authors being paid because of how it makes checkouts fungible.
Is what it is if we want to have published books.
Most of the ones I see are the same price as the physical book, so I usually borrow them from the library for the first read and buy a physical book if I like it and will reread it. I cant justify paying the same price for physical and digital, if they where all like yours at 1/3 price I would buy a lot more.
I also employ this method - I typically listen to audiobooks (because I can do that while I work due to the nature of my job) that I get from the library. If I like the book enough to want to reread, I'll buy a copy of the physical book.
I definitely wouldn't pay the same price for a digital book as for a physical book unless it's an indie author and they have some rational explanation for the price. If I recall correctly, my physical book and ebook pdfs use nearly the same pdf, if not exactly the same pdf. I would feel super unethical offering them both at the same price for no extra work. Instead, they're both offered at the same cost / net profit.
Libraries can be a great way to lend ebooks but, it depends very much on how you will read the book.
Many extant books have simply been digitialized horribly. Essentially the ebook is often just a series of the images, which means:
I have different 3 different library apps installed on my tablet (Libby, Overdrive, Press Reader) and they worry greatly in quality, all of them have issues. I'm an active reader who likes to mark things, look up definitions or pictures, copy passages, scribble margin notes, bookmark pages , etc. but the apps themselves still have many basic issues. For example:
All of this is why buying a physical copy or a well formated EPUB file is often still the better choice, albeit not the more economic one.
I realize we're in a transition phase from analog to digital format, so here's to hoping that it'll all get better in the future. 😁
Trad publishers, for the last fifteen years now, have been pursuing the same strategy with their ebook pricing. Keeping them high. Why? Partly for profit, because the ebook costs a fraction to deliver (and the actual file, the content, was already formatted and prepared for readers to traditionally publish anyway). Any ebook sold is mostly pure cream, and the trads are happy to drink it.
But mostly they price their ebooks at or beyond physical books to prop up those physical books and the sale of them.
If they priced ebooks more 'reasonably', and of course people are going to have differing opinions about 'reasonable' they'll argue vociferously over, then that would tend to make ebooks more popular. Trads don't want that, because their advantage is in the physical.
For a century and more, trad publishers have built up connections and business arrangements with printing presses and book stores. They have deals and friendly relations with bookstore buyers, with critics, with the media, that rely on and leverage physical books.
That's the advantage they continue to weaponize against independent publishing. They need the general public to believe "the only real books are dead tree books on a physical store shelf." It delegitimizes independent authors, who focus on content (aka, the actual story, the actual book, rather than its physical or virtual form). It's the sole lever they have, and they continue to pull on it.
Trads aren't going to give that up until they either have zero choice due to shifts in the market (a shift they're working against by propping up physical books in the eyes of consumers), or enough independent authors with high visibility force that shift.
A couple of years ago, you finally started seeing "big name" authors begin to break away from trads. Brandon Sanderson is an example. He's operated adjacent to the independent spaces for more than a decade now. He's met, talked with, interviewed, even highlighted wildly successful indie authors. People who never went through a trad and who are making a lot of money due to their success.
Some of those very financially successful authors don't even hit any of the traditional Trad Publishing milestones for success, such as being on the NYT bestseller list. A list, by the way, that is basically just a handful of New York bookstores that report sales to the newspaper. So it's not "bestsellers", it's "best selling physical books in a handful of physical bookstores." There's a reason Trads can game the list, and do.
Sanderson saw that for years, but took a long time to stop believing he has to funnel his publishing through a trad house that takes a huge cut, an ongoing cut from each and every book forever, for things that are basic services he can pay for himself.
What's the result been for Sanderson? He's high volume, because he's a Big Name with built in visibility and fans earned from prior success. So he has some employees now, who do warehouse and editing and PR and distribution things for him.
Rather than having to surrender a cut of each book in perpetuity (Trad contract), he pays fixed costs for these fixed services. He's plowing his funds into not just employing people, but also into things the customers like (such as merch and signed copies and so forth).
As he continues to write and publish independently, he's becoming more and more of a success story. His trad books don't pay him what his independent books do. And his visibility isn't just to readers, but other writers as well. Including the lucrative Big Names Trads fear losing like they're losing Sanderson.
He's the nightmare for Trads. They know, sooner or later, Sanderson will be joined by other Big Names. Who'll see it, wonder and think, try it, and at least some of whom will start doing it too. That'll spread, two becomes four, four becomes ... and eventually even more indies become further emboldened, heartened, by that. It's the (unfortunately slow) avalanche that'll force shifts in the industry that'll hammer the lid down on the coffin of trad publishing.
Extortion level ebook prices are the Trads trying to cling to what they have. To resist having to change. To try and avoid letting their sole remaining advantage that props up the entire house of cards that is Traditional Publishing, keeping it from tumbling to the table.
I disagree.
A similar scenario happened in music publishing when The Beatles founded Apple Records. Did all the big bands (at least those who had the option) make their own record label? No. It's expensive, it's a lot of work, and the big names have a lot of negotiating power that smaller names don't (something Brandon Sanderson has explicitly said he doesn't want, except to get better deals for everyone). Taylor Swift didn't even create her own record label to separate herself from her old masters (double entendre intended). She just re-recorded the songs and negotiated a good deal with an existing company. Even today, when recording and releasing an album can be done from your basement, it's really difficult to "make it big" without going through a record label. There's the occasional YouTube sensation who can probably negotiate a good deal with a label, but most people need the marketing push from "Big Music".
Brandon Sanderson created Dragonsteel Books because he enjoys it and that's just who he is. And that's great for him. He might (this is my own speculation, not based on anything he's said) eventually start publishing for other authors at some point (as Apple Records published other, non-Beatles, artists). But other big names aren't going to have the same drive and passion as Sanderson to split away from the traditional publishers. The big names will just take their highly-favourable deals, and move on with their lives while not caring about the up-and-comers. The up-and-comers will take the exploitative deals, because they already tried self-publishing an ebook, and no one bought it.
I've always been very sceptical of bestseller lists.
Besides the obvious shenanigans that publishers can do like purchasing their own volumes to increase their rank many people buy books simply because they are on this list, ie its a self-perpetuating preferential attachment scheme. Which gives all the more incentive to manipulate the ranking.
Besides, the implicit assumption that lots of copies sold = good content // a good match for the reader at least is tenuous at best.
I've noticed the frequent higher than acceptable ebook pricing as well and it is why I rarely buy them. Physical books tend to get discounted as they age and you can get them used for very low prices where ebooks rarely get discounted and there is no (legal) concept of gifting or selling used ebooks. It just makes them a poor buy most of the time despite being my slightly preferred way to read. I have had much poorer luck borrowing ebooks that I want to read from the library versus physical books as well.
Some history:
Amazon and publisher Hachette end dispute over online book sales (2014)
…
But now there is a class-action lawsuit accusing Amazon and the major publishers of price-fixing.
Amazon must face narrowed lawsuit over eBook prices, US judge says
I wonder how Amazon sets book prices nowadays?
I was wondering about historical prices, specifically my historical prices, so I went back and looked at my Amazon history, and the first book I ever bought on the site was a paperback that cost $10.49 in 2002. A quick look at the next few years showed paperback purchase prices between $4 - $20.
I read books on my e-reader, usually from Libby, Project Gutenberg (or similar), or Amazon, so prices range from about $0 - $15. The book I'm currently reading cost me $2. Given that, as you say, we're paying for content rather than paper, I don't expect the prices to decrease over time in the same way as other consumer products that benefit from advances in manufacturing and distribution. I consider it pretty good that books are still roughly the same price as 20 years ago.
I feel like that depends what you're buying - All the stuff I can find at a quick glance is max 8 euros - fiction, fantasy, romancey stuffs, etc. Granted, this is amazon ebooks, and iirc, you can't easily strip the DRM off those to keep forever, which is bullshit.
I don't even try buying ebooks of old books, I just go to other sources for that, because back in the early OCR days, people would take the time to correct the OCR output and you'd be able to get ones where it was all formatted and corrected and nice.
Edit: I should say, I totally understand why authors would have higher prices - they're also people who have to live in this world and the price for everything has gone up, which means either they price stuff higher to keep being able to live off of their job... or they do something else, which means no more writing.
$8.40 USD for people who are not used to euronating. :-)
I've been told that at least in the US the publisher ( not the seller, not the author ) sets the price.
My suspicion is that the lion's share of the money goes to the publisher, similar to the film and music industries.
This is one of the reason why I think it's important to purchase directly from the author when you can, instead of Amazon or other publishers. Ideally, if you buy directly from them, and the publisher isn't running their website, they get more of the money.
The publisher and the distributor are two different things. In fact, Amazon is one of the most common places for self published authors to distribute their work, since it’s relatively easy to get onto, compared to something like Barnes and nobles where you’re competing for shelf space.
Publishing deals involve exclusivity - if you sign with a publisher, people can’t buy “directly” from you.
You're right. I self-published a coloring book on Amazon, so I didn't think about them as a distributor rather than a publisher, if that makes sense. They took a rather large cut for printing the thing and mailing it, but I guess that's the cost of physical media - hence my thought process here in mentioning Amazon.
Most of the money would go to a publisher, although they also bear most of the costs, but it’s also where all the money the author gets is from?
It’s never been easier to self publish either. This isn’t a situation as with academic journals where the author is decrying the expensive price tag - no, they would very much prefer if you paid the sticker price.
I won't provide any links. But the search query "strip DRM calibre plugin" provides a good starting point to find the most recent working tools. Insure you've found a gitlab repo that has been updating recently, and mobilereads is a good forum to learn how to use them in more depth.