Slashdot Mirror
Publishers Warned On Ebook Prices
An anonymous reader writes "The DoJ says Simon and Schuster, Hachette, Penguin, Macmillan and HarperCollins conspired to raise the prices of ebooks. The report originates from the WSJ, but the BBC adds comments from an analyst bizarrely claiming increased prices are somehow a good thing and thinking otherwise is the result of 'confusion'. I'd like to see an explanation of why the wholesale model, while continuing to work fine (presumably) for physical books, somehow didn't work for ebooks and why the agency model is better despite increasing costs for consumers."
Sounds like these publishers don't know their market. I only buy ebooks because they are inexpensive. At relatively close prices I'd prefer a physical book (where at least I won't be restricted by the publisher's "loan" policy!).
Well he got one thing right: "All the costs are the people in the publisher's HQ..." Exactly. So why don't authors just upload their e-books and cut out publishers all together?
If you are going to add commentary you will need to explain some things. What is agency model? I'm a tech guy not a book publishing guy. A definition would be helpful.
From TFA:
How are the DoJ dictating lower ebook prices? Aren't they just investigating whether there is price fixing going on in a collusion between publishers? Is this admitting that they are artificially inflating prices?
And I've gotten it that there are more costs than printing a book. But, how does that translate into forcing ebook sellers to use the Agency model? I used to buy all my ebooks from Fictionwise but have had to switch to Amazon because Fictionwise was unable to agree to the Agency model. They have definitely hurt competition with this.
Previously, companies made bank on hardware e-readers and sometimes commissions on book sales. Those companies would buy some books that were popular and sell them at a loss in order to get people locked onto their hardware platform/store. Apple upset this somewhat by allowing publishers to set prices directly (but also forcing them to set prices equal to any loss leader so Apple was no undercut). This left no incentive for loss leaders, but those same publishers also did not care about vendor lock in.
The whole situation is a trade off.
Interesting. I recall Bill Gates saying something about consumer confusion. In Microsoft's case it was seen as good that there was no real competition, since that would confuse consumers.
The arrogance of large companies never ceases to amaze.
eBooks prices are too high.
I've never understood why eBooks prices are too high, sometimes almost the same price of a paper book, bearing in mind all the manufacture, paper, ink etc. that the eBook does not have at all.
That was even before the so-called "agency" model. There were ebooks available at Fictionwise for $20 years after the paperback had been released at $6.99.
Then they opened up on their feet with a fully automatic weapon, "agency," which attempted to raise eBook prices, banned things like discounts and rebates, and generally attempted to kill eBooks by overpricing them.
They also canceled existing pre-orders at the lower prices. I had a book on order at Fictionwise I had pre-ordered at $8. They forced FW to cancel the deal and refund my money, removed the book and a lot of other ones from fictionwise, and "generously" offered me the book at $12 at either Amazon or Barnes and Noble. My eBook buying, which included buying books at ridiculous prices but getting store credit as a rebate, dropped from over $2000/year to less than $200.
When publishers start acting sane (I'm NOT counting on it) I may go back to them. In the meantime, I've never stopped buying everything Baen brings out, and loving it and them.
The Agency model appears to be more of a piracy creation model. You pay $14 for a movie you walk out on before it is over. You watch broadcast TV and then they want to sell you the episode you missed. And, you see $7.95 for the paperback or Kindle versions. The bad taste becomes resentment and that encourages piracy rationalization that it is your due.
Technology drives prices downward, entrenched market players conspire to try to keep prices high.
You remember all those books that would get written and not published? They would be sent to publishers or agents and rejected, usually without anyone taking a second glance at them. Those books are now all on amazon.com. For 99c. The publishers don't like it. If they don't feel a book is worth publishing, then no one should be allowed to read it! Or at the very least, they should have to charge full price, just like the noble publishers do.
Why not paypal the author a few bucks and torrent the ebooks? No trees getting cut nor used books getting shipped around and the author makes money. Keep doing this until publishers realize their short sighted stupidity and change their ways.
CDs costs were kept high because they were digital and better and the technology was new, right? Funny that the price never declined as the technology matured.
This is why at least three quarters of my ebook purchases are from Baen. They price their regular books fairly reasonably, "hardback" books are about $10 than list price, and when they come out in paperback they're about $2-3 off the list price. And for a lot of books if you're willing to pay a small premium they'll let you get the ARC version ("Advance Reader Copy") before the publication date. They also do monthly bundles of books, five or more books packaged together for the price of two or three books, well worth it if you know you really want at least two of the books in the bundle. Plus they have a free library that will let you try out a large number of books for free (in the hopes that you'll buy more books from that author later of course) and their books are DRM free, because they understand that piracy isn't a real problem.
Hopefully if Baen continues to do well eventually the big publishers will learn from their example.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Could someone explain exactly why an author (which I am not) of a written work is unable to release his/her content to the masses without the need of a publisher?
I imagine I can publish a document to an ebook store (which I am assuming is not considered a "publisher" since it is a "store") or even a website for purchase and bypass the need for these publishing companies.
Of course my imagination can be rather wild so maybe this ease is out of the scope of reality.
Just dramatically increased the value of "rip" and "burn" software development, same as they did with CD prices creating the MP3 market. Invest in "Writers" and "Burners", the Chinese will be happy to make the hardware.
Gently reply
"It comes down to what kind of books you want to continue to be available."
Why? What the fuck does it cost you to publish an electronic book? Ignore advertising, marketing and the rest of that crap.
The only cost is the time it takes you to make it and how much the publisher can rape you for.
There, fixed that for ya.
You can have the best book in existence, but if no one hears about it, no one will ever buy it. It's entirely possible to publish on your own, on a personal website, with a paypal or visa shopping cart or something attached to take orders. What publishers do is get exposure. Even just on amazon.com, maybe they don't directly advertise you, but if someone searches for books, yours will pop up in there somewhere. How do people know to go to your personal website if you are a new unknown author?
It is feasible to do entirely on your own when you are a popular author, but someone starting out new still needs an advertising boost of some sort, or at least listed in a catalog most people know about to make it somewhat easier to discover. However, ebooks should be incredibly cheaper, given that as you pointed out, "publishers" don't really have to publish (or even edit, in some cases) anything. They simply add you to the catalog and handle the sales, and send you royalties. Their cut for something that is essentially automatic (handled by servers) should be much lower than the companies seem to think they deserve.
Conspiring to break the law is legal for Apple ... they are like Microsoft++, just as evil but without any trouble from government.
People pay what they think a product is worth, they don't care how much it costs. For the right kind of widget, you can make them at $2 a widget and sell them at $100 each, if people are prepared to pay that much for it. Another widget may cost $10 to make but people aren't prepared to pay more than $12 for it... It doesn't matter how much ebooks cost to produce versus physical books, the average reader thinks ebooks should cost less, and the producers need to adjust their prices, budgets, life-styles to reflect the market.
with an 'unsold' ebook
According to TFA, the publishers went 'agency' in order to try to stop Amazon from 'cornering the market' by selling books cheaply. Now they are under DoJ fire for what was essentially an attempt to set an artificial price floor across the industry.
Squeeze. Crunch.
Y'know what might have been a better plan? Not Insisting on the DRM that makes it possible, and easy, for an incumbent seller to lock in large numbers of buyers and obtain the market power needed to then put the publishers on the rack... It's not as though the story of iTunes went exactly that way with team RIAA or anything...
If DRM actually magically worked, there might be some business case for accepting a smaller slice of an impregnable walled garden; but the present state of it is trivially weak for all the common book formats. Good work on stopping no pirates and giving large retailers the power to cut your throat, guys...
If I'm typical, (and I probaly am not) Amazon, et al, would get more money from me by LOWERING the price.
90% of the ebooks I "buy" are free- either from Amazon, or Gutenberg, or elsewhere. The other 10% I will only buy if they are cheap. If eBooks were in the $2.99/3.99 range (for books I wanted) - I wouldn't hesitate- and the vast majority of books I read would be eBooks.
Instead of making $7 profit on me once or twice a year- they could be getting $1 profit from me 20 or so times a year. Multiply me by a few hundred thousand and that profit margain goes up.
I don't know that I am typical though- in fact I probably am not- because I actually enjoy reading HG Wells, Oscar Wilde, etc- and I don't consider it too much a hassel to not be buying the latest-pop ficiton mega-release.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Zounds! Next, you'll be showing me an ebook about Gambling in Casablanca (for an exorbitant fee)!
Oh man I love Baen. I buy most of my books from them.
The biggest problem I'm running into now is that I've bought everything they have that I want to read (It doesn't help that I already had a massive library of Baen books in paperback).
I just hope they keep growing and adding authors.
The author can then negotiate two separate publication deals, one for the ebook version and one for the paper version.
Most likely, a third person will be required, who will be paid to shill the book and get the book tour going.
Ibid.
...why the agency model is better despite increasing costs for consumers...
I'm pretty sure you just answered your own question ;-)
Try Baen Books or Smashwords. They sell DRM free titles.
Baen has mostly top notch, mainstream authors, albeit only SciFi and Fantasy. Smashwords is a little more of a mixed bag, but some well established authors (like Kristine Kathryn Rusch) are publishing on Smashwords.
According to the article "Under this scheme, publishers set the price of a book". Bang, full stop. Right there the publisher has set the price across the entire market. If this is not price fixing, what is? The fact that the prices for most books across publishers shows collusion and is a rather obvious basis for anti-trust. That said I look around at the rampant price fixing and the penalties for it that are less than the profits made by doing it (RAM price fixing anyone?) so I don't expect it to change. This is an extension of the current business model which is to gain a monopoly and milk your customers for all they have once you got it. The monopoly is now created by any one of: true monopolies (single access to resource), colluded monopolies (price fixing, cartel dealings), artificial monopolies (patents, legal hindrance, software data lock-in). Maybe it's just me but I see it in the U.S. in everything: cell phone providers, ISPs. online music, tech components, ebooks, software (quickbooks is the worst), consumer electronics, auto parts, gasoline and fuel costs, and on and on and on. It is how big business operates and the primary reason I try to deal more and more with small businesses.
"conspired to raise the prices of ebooks"
conspired with APPLE to raise the prices of ebooks - fixed
I finally started buying a few eBooks because the prices seemed to be drifting down. Bought some programming texts at half the printed price. Would like to see better, but my physical home library is packed as it is.
Today's lesson: anecdotal evidence sucks.
I prefer to buy the physical book, then download an E-copy from someone who has done some decent editing and make it readable. I like having both options and use both regularly.
The actual complaint is against these publishers AND apple who initially set the contract with the publishers to say that in order to publish on iBooks they could not sell the same eBook for less anywhere else. See http://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/139517569/lawsuit-apple-publishers-colluded-on-e-book-prices. Seems to me Apple is who is the biggest part of the issue here.
The Justice Dept. is suing Apple and publishers over the agency model, claiming that it keeps prices artificially high. However, app stores have been using the agency model since the iPhone came out, and mobile software has never been cheaper. Any time indies are allowed to enter a market and set realistic prices, prices over all will eventually drop. If there was any basis at all for this lawsuit then it would still cost me $5 to get Monopoly on my mobile phone.
I always find it a little funny when government decries industry collusion for setting a price floor.
Is the minimum wage not a price floor that stops things from being too cheap?
Are unions not a price floor that prevents competition and colludes across companies to provide a price floor?
Is it really that wrong for industries to help prevent a race to the bottom... we're not talking about holding society hostage of life essentials like food.
I'm not saying I like price collusion; be they unions or industries... but is it ridiculous that people get so outraged when industry does it... while at the same time complaining about the race to the bottom.
Like it or not... rich industries provide rich jobs.
Hyper-competitive industries like retail provide crap jobs... see Walmart.
"you haven't seen a book in its raw, straight-from-the-author form."
Yes I have. Anything from MIT Press.
The wholesale model requires that the publishers provide significant added value. Without paper books they don't.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I can't say I entirely agree with the publishers.
But what I realize is this is a move of desperation that is essential for the survival of the physical book market as we know it. The same is true for any other physical medium that has a digital replacement (ie music, movies, software not in the form of downloadable content).
Of course it's cheaper in the 'mid'-term (I mean 'mid' because there is a big upfront payment required to purchase the hardware and there is a long term price because of the need to repurchase these books, songs, movies, etc when the distribution company has gone belly up or has decided to cancel its service... and by cancel I am including the idea that the company may require a repurchase of the content simply because of slight changes to the hardware, content itself, or other devious policies).
If you look at the market as a people with computers vs. people without computers, you quickly realize you want to sell to the people with computers.
Umberto Eco has a publishing company driving the action in FP and describes much of the cryptic activity that drives the economics of the business. There are forces at work that drive pricing that you might not expect.
BTW I just finished the Kindle edition, and was really irritated by the obvious typos from scanning artifacts. Admittedly, that is a hard book for a spell checker, but seeing "c" instead of "e" in common words a dozen times is unacceptable when they charge more than for a paperback.
"Fixes are automatically distributed to people who have the book."
Absolutely NOT! That is a terrible idea. Can you not see how that would be just ripe for abuse and censorship?
Typos and all, when I buy a book, I can read what the author had intended for me to read. Not something which was later changed because someone didnt like the message.
Yes, I know you are only talking about corrections, but my point is, who gets to decide what a "correction" is?
According to TFA, the publishers went 'agency' in order to try to stop Amazon from 'cornering the market' by selling books cheaply. Now they are under DoJ fire for what was essentially an attempt to set an artificial price floor across the industry.
Not just "cheaply." Amazon was selling books at a loss to corner the market and Jeff Bezos didn't care if it bankrupted most of the publishers in the process. He wanted total control over the book market and, until Apple stepped in, he had it for all practical purposes. So the publishers weren't trying to set an artificial price floor to sustain high profits. They were trying to force Bezos to sell books for something approaching fair market value so they wouldn't go bankrupt. The fact that Amazon had to raise prices so quickly once the publishers had another outlet ought to tell you something about how anti-competitive Jeff Bezos's practices and pricing were in the first place.
I'm always amazed that so many of the same crowd that decried Microsoft's monopolistic practices has no problem cheering on Bezos and his attempts to achieve a stranglehold over the US book market. But I guess they're not afraid to cheer for a ruthless monopolist as long as it saves them a few bucks.
Putting the issue of collusion aside, who, exactly, is saying that publishers can't charge what they want? Is someone proposing a law capping ebook prices at an arbitrary level? No?
Then what are you going on about?
People are simply pointing out that pricing an ebook at the same price as a physical copy from a store is a ripoff for the person buying the ebook. With a book you have actual physical costs: printing, shipping, storage, labor at B&N, etc. Whereas ebooks are nearly pure profit for the publisher.
And with physical books, you can resell them or give them away when you've finished reading them - something you can't do with commercial ebooks.
So, what are you gong on about again?
Take a look at Baen's ebook website. There are a dozen other publishers listed these days.
According to TFA, the publishers went 'agency' in order to try to stop Amazon from 'cornering the market' by selling books cheaply. Now they are under DoJ fire for what was essentially an attempt to set an artificial price floor across the industry.
Well, part of the reason was also that Apple wanted to use the agency model (like they do with music) but there was that little addition to the contract that said that they can't sell it to anyone else cheaper than they can sell it to Apple.
So they couldn't have a "wholesale" price and an "agency" price because then they'd have to give Apple the "wholesale" price.
An agent can set you up with an editor. Your agent can also take over marketing. There are things called banks that provide loans to buisnesses to help pay for things.
I desperately wanted one when they came out because of the promise of e-books, but the greed of the publishers has ruined that. When the electronic version of the book barely costs any less than the physical book, I'll take the physical version because I get something tangible for negligible additional cost. I don't have such a need for instant gratification that I can't wait a day or two for Amazon to get it to me.
None of these media cartels seems to realize that the point of electronic distribution is to bring the price down for the consumer so publishers can make it up in sales volume-- not so they can keep the price nearly the same as for the physical product and use the savings in production/distribution costs to pad their profits.
My point was that, by insisting on DRM(which makes lock-in to a specific 'ecosystem' trivial and legally enforced), the publishers made it possible for somebody to 'corner' the market at all:
Scenario 1: Ebooks are sold without DRM. Bezos purchases books at wholesale price and sells them at wholesale price - x. Everybody buys from Amazon because Amazon is basically paying them $x to do so. Publishers get wholesale price/copy. Now, if Amazon attempts to turn the screws and raise the price, people lose interest and walk away because they can just as easily buy from B&N and read on their Kindle or read their already purchased texts on another device, or whatever.
Scenario 2: Ebooks are sold with DRM. Bezos purchases books at wholesale price and sells them at wholesale price -x. Everybody buys from Amazon, etc. Now if Amazon decides to turn the screws, they have a locked-in audience who cannot legally read their existing texts outside of Amazon's garden, nor can they purchase texts from elsewhere and read them on their existing hardware. Now buying market share and then turning the screws has value...
That's my point: Since the publisher gets wholesale price either way, Amazon's willingness to lose money isn't money out of their pockets(it is, in fact, a subsidy for their product) unless Amazon can erect barriers to entry by losing money initially. With DRM, barriers to entry are easy(indeed, since it doesn't dissuade pirates, it's one of the few things that DRM is good for). Without it, barriers to entry are a great deal harder.
My point was not that Amazon was playing nice. I have no reason to think that well of them. My point was that, in the absence of DRM, the costs of taking your texts and walking away, or staying but buying elsewhere, are very low. Thus, the value of dominant market share is low. In the presence of DRM, the value of dominant market share is high; because the cost of leaving your walled garden once you've entered is high, which allows those who have been brought in to be squeezed.
Force agency pricing. Agency pricing means you dictate the RETAIL price of the item. You tell the vendors "You may not sell this for less than price $X" Doesn't matter if the vendor is willing to take less margins, you are setting the final price.
That's why you see all those "This price is set by the publisher," on Amazon. They are telling you that the publisher is using agency pricing, they are forcing Amazon to set the retail price to a given level, even if Amazon were willing to take less.
And yes, this is all because of a nice illegal collusion. Happened when Apple got in to the ebook market. Apple told publishers that to sell on Apple products, they had to agree to not sell anywhere else for a lower retail price. To use agency pricing. The publishers agreed and all of a sudden ebooks were the same price on all services, and from all publishers. Nice bit of illegal collusion.
Hopefully it'll get sorted out here in a couple years. The DoJ and the EU are both after the publishers about it, and there's a class action lawsuit in the US.
For one, people love "deals". If they perceive they are getting better than normal value for their money, they are more likely to buy to "save money" even though of course you are doing nothing of the sort.
Also there are plenty of price points below which certain filters turn off, meaning people care less and research the purchase less and just impulse buy.
Now in the physical world, there are limits. Items cost money to make, shelf space costs money, etc. So you can't just lower the price on shit to arbitrary values. No problem with digital goods. The cost to distribute a copy is so low it might as well be zero. Since your per unit cost is basically nothing, you can set the price per unit to any level you wish. You'll make money so long as you sell enough.
If I were a book publisher, I'd exploit the shit out of this. I'd leave my physical book prices where they are, and sell ebooks at minimum of 75% price and probably less. That way people would see ebooks as a good deal, since you got the same book for less money. I'd list them in terms of MSRP of physical books, of course. I'd frequently put them on sale too. Pick a title that was underperforming and knock it to 50% of ebook price so all of a sudden people are seeing a title of "25%" of it's original price. My goal would be for people to fill their digital libraries with books that they'd never even get around to reading. Get them to buy when they see something they think they might want to read, not when they need a new book. Fuck per copy profit, I'd make more overall profit because people would buy way more books.
All that, and they'd feel like I was doing them a favour by doing it. They'd be happy, I'd be happy, the authors would be happy.
1.If they price the digital copies too far below the print copies (or more specifically, too far below the RRP of the print copies), retailers who stock the print copies will complain and may buy less print copies (which then feeds into the up-front costs of a production run for the print books and increases the costs for the publisher of the print run)
2.A desire to use price as a marketing tool (i.e. certain books cost more or cost less in order to influence peoples purchasing habits towards certain titles)
3.A desire to stop e-booksellers from engaging in price wars to try and gain market share (although neither Apple nor Amazon seems interested in open competition or a price war anyway since both bookstores have policies prohibiting the sale of the same title cheaper on another store)
The reason the physical book format is superior to that of ebooks is because when in-between the tarmac and 10,000ft ... I can read MY book.
HA! Suck it Kindle guy ...>SUCK IT
The button you click says "Buy" therefor it is sale regardless of what the publisher thinks they did. The Clayton Act makes these EULAs illegal anyways.
"Yes, I know you are only talking about corrections, but my point is, who gets to decide what a "correction" is?
George Lucas...duh!
little piggy, little piggy let the wolf in...
medical cannabis
raw milk
gibson guitars
ebook retailers
apple
Yes yes yes, Oh Yes we masturbate in your faces cause there's not a fucking thing you can do with no constitution and a criminal government full of fucking psychopaths, and a retarded fucking public brainwashed by the fascist media.
Yes Yes, give Israel the bunker busters. QE3, QE4, QE5, QEX from the fed. $4, $5, $6, $7 gas which should cost .25 a gallon, beat the fuck out of protesters and make them into an enemy belligerent one fucked soul at a time, even though they fought for this country, yes lets fire up the FEMA cams and the gas chambers and the vaccines and the plastic black coffins, yes yes feed your kids GMOs, HFCS, fluoride, hexachromium, lithium and zanax in the water, yes lets pay for being born forced to buy health insurance while spied on by the fuckwads everywhere, Yes More Fusion Centers, more TSA checkpoints in the middle of nowhere, more panties, more bras, more naked scanners, fuck your urban garden it's outlawed, you can't sell your own food, you can't help your neighbor, you can't tell the judge who wants you to swear an oath that you already swore an oath.
My birthday is in 2 hours. March 9th, last birthday we had fukushima (which still isn't even being addressed that it is IN FACT a fuckign dirty bomb right now, yet all these fuckwad DHS oath breakers want to do is FUCK US.
FUCK YOU DOJ
Eric Holder ought to be hunted the fuck down because he is a fucking DOMESTIC TERRORIST
And now the US military say's it fucking answers to NATO and the UN. that about sums it up you /. motherfuckers
From the BBC article:
"The perception is that publishers are saving a fortune because they are not physically printing a book," he said. Actually, said Mr Evans, printing costs were a small fraction of the total outlay required to produce a book.
"All the costs are the people in the publisher's HQ and the writer's mortgage," he said, adding that these had not changed significantly with the rise of ebooks."
========
The PROBLEM with Mr. Evans' assertion is this:
Most of the other costs are one-time. Printing and distribution, though, go on and on, as long as the book is in print. But with ebooks, that cost is essentially ZERO. And distribution, as can be seen below, is NOT insignificant.
For example, there is this article:
http://ireaderreview.com/2009/05/03/book-cost-analysis-cost-of-physical-book-publishing/
From the article:
"A Simple Model of Book Costs and an Example
The very simple break-up is -
Author - Creation. 8-15% Royalties. ;)
Publisher - Being the Curator, Polishing, Manufacturing, Marketing. 45-55% (includes Author's Royalties). Note that Printing accounts for just 10% of the book price.
Distributor - 10%.
Retailers - 40%.
Consumers. Just the paying part
An example found at BookFinder states a cost break-up that closely matched what my research turned up -
Book Retail Price: $27.95.
Retailer (discount, staffing, rent, etc.) - $12.58. That's 45%.
Author Royalties - $4.19. Exactly 15%.
Wholesaler - $2.80. Exactly 10%.
Pre-production (Publisher) - $3.55. That's 12.7%.
Printing (Publisher) - $2.83. Translates to 10.125%.
Marketing (Publisher) - $2. That's approximately 7.15%."
========
So, here's my take:
The wholesaler and retailer are handling REAL, PHYSICAL BOOKS and moving them around. That cost gets dropped.
And the cost of PRINTING the book goes away, too. That's another 10% or so.
That's 65%!
So an ebook should be about 35% the list cost of a hardback.
That's for popular fiction, essentially. Other markets have other margins. But eBooks are FOCUSED on popular fiction right now--the other markets are speculative niches so far.
Geez. What are they thinking, other than, "Let's abuse the public and steal their money!"?
I don't own an ebook. I don't want to pay hundreds of dollars for a propriatary reader that things can disappear from, in a proprietary format (can you say, "8-track tapes", boys and grllls?). I also admit that I like the feel of a real book.
I didn't know the prices. There is *zero* printing and binding cost, and "distribution cost" is a website, with no shipping involved. And they're not even typeset - the authors type it all up, all they do is reformat. So why do the prices range from 125% of a paperback to two-thirds of a hardback?
And *that* leads to the two-ton elephant in the room: with such lower production and distribution costs, how much more do the authors get? Or do they get the same miniscule amount that they do with real books? (Ok, you can stop laughing now.)
That is, when they get *anything* at all beyond the advance.
Give me a $1.50 ebook, in HTML (or .pdf, at worst), with 50% going to the author, and I'm there. In the meantine, there's Project Gutenberg.
mark
Looks like Baen has it right. http://www.baen.com/library/intro.asp
An ebook has none of those costs, to charge the same price for something physical that costs money to get into your hands as something that is essentially free once they've paid the editing, proofreading, and other pre-production costs is nothing short of highway robbery. And as another poster High Quality Wallpapers said, you own a physical book. You don't own an ebook.Were it not for collusion, the competetion would ensure that ebook prices were far loawer than the price of a physical book.