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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."
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.
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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.
After your purchase, use Calibre & dedrm plugins to put them into a form where you have control. See http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/hello-world/ for dedrm info.
Calibre is a great piece of open source software which makes managing ebooks on multiple devices easy.
The agency model is where publishers set the price of books and retailers get a percentage. This isn't MSRP, the publisher actually gets to set the price the book is sold for.
As opposed to the wholesale model print books use, where publishers sell books to retailers, give them a MSRP, and then the retailers get to set their own prices.
When Amazon started selling ebooks, they used the wholesale model and would frequently set the price to just over whatever the publisher charged them, or even for a loss. As this frequently put the cost of an ebook below the price of a paperback when the book was only available in hardback, publishers got worried that Amazon would get too dominant. When Apple offered to use the agency model, publishers used that to force Amazon to switch.
The thing that really annoys me is that some publishers are lazy about updating their pricelists, so you'll often see the ebook still listed at hardback prices months after the paperback version is available. That sort of crap makes me buy the paperback, use the IRC scanner, and then stuff the book in the attic. The publisher actually makes less money, but at least they kept their precious paper sales.
I run a small publishing company. Our printing and shipping costs are about 1/4 of our overall production costs. The rest is in paying researchers, editors, and royalties to the authors. None of those costs change if we go to ebooks, in fact there are some added costs in producing an ebook version because there's no elegant way to export charts and tables to EPUB or MOBI from InDesign (where we do our print layout), at least not without a ton of hand tweaking. Code generators suck.
So, you know. It's anecdotal. But that's why our $35 book will probably sell for $28 or so in ebook.
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas