Why are ebooks double the price?

jaysus

jaysus

jaysus

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Something I've always wondered - why are ebooks twice the price of their paperback equivilent? Or am I missing something and just looking in the wrong place?

On Waterstones website I looked up a book I recently bought for about £4 in paperback. Its a recently released thriller from a mainstream author (Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child if anyones interested - good book.) In paperback its £4 at Waterstones. In ebook its more than £10. I found the same thing with other titles in the past, the only ebooks I found cheap were either old literature (The Illiad for £2 anyone?) or naff/obscure books. Mainstream stuff was all much more expensive than paperback, and often more than hardback.

Why? I'm sure theres got to be a reason for it to cost twice as much when there is no printing or material costs, and the costs associated with setting up the facility to download material are by no means cheap but aren't ridiculous either. The savings in the physical production of books are also much bigger I'd imagine than other media (itunes, steam etc) so why do they cost so much?
 
It's new, I suppose.

I wouldn't be genuinely interested in eBooks until it's cheaper and that seems a fair way off. Just seems too much to me to spend £200 or so on the reader for the priveledge of paying the same or more for the books with no physical copy, just so I can carry several books on me.

I'm sure sooner or later it will be worth it, but not yet. Plus I love the smell of books. I think books, for me, will be much harder to let go of than CDs (long forgotten for me) or DVDs (getting there).
 
they cost that much because the whole ebook thing is currently only run by a few stores. they have a relative monopoly on the ebook market and that means that they can charge almost as much as they want.

it doesn't help that many people are impressionable idiots who are willing to pay that much.
 
You just can't beat the feel of paper to be honest. Even on Star Trek they had paper books.

vxogtw.jpg

:D
 
jaysus said:
Something I've always wondered - why are ebooks twice the price of their paperback equivilent? Or am I missing something and just looking in the wrong place?
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Convenience. People will always pay more if they don't have to move their backside.
 
I can't think of anything worse to sit and stare at. Something about a book that makes it appealing. Smooth, white, involving. A computer screen doesn't do that for me and it burns my retinas.

However, I totally understand the environmental benefits of ebooks over a huge stack of paper books. I'm going to find it hard to change.
 
Agreed, the thought of reading a book that way doesn't really sound that enticing. However the screens are different from e.g. a PDA or something. Somebody who has one says it's more like reading from a calculator.

I guess they're more expensive because it's a new format of distributing them. Like Blu-Rays on dvds they new advantageous format is dearer.
 
To be honest I've thought about ebooks because theres mobile phone ebook reader software available, and because I can just as happily sit and read a lengthy forum post as read a book - reading from a PC screen doesn't bother me, and since I do the majority of my reading at home I'd be just as happy reading off my netbook.

I was under the impression they were becoming more mainstream and there were more places doing them, but having done some googling theres not that many, so I suppose that is going to make an impact on the price.

The VAT thing is odd...I don't see how they're any more luxury items than a paperback. And cheers for the free ebook links, I'm assuming they're legal though so they're unlikely to contain recently released literature?
 
Jonny69 said:
I can't think of anything worse to sit and stare at. Something about a book that makes it appealing. Smooth, white, involving. A computer screen doesn't do that for me and it burns my retinas.

However, I totally understand the environmental benefits of ebooks over a huge stack of paper books. I'm going to find it hard to change.
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That's why eink is so good.
 
it's not really true i've been buying ebooks from ereader (formerly peanutpress) for years and usually with their rewards section you can have paperback bestsellers for under 7 USD.

Sadly the european publishers have cottoned on to the potential to price gouge the european ebook market (much in the same was as the rest of the media look at DVD, Blu Ray and PC Games) and have banned ereader from selling books to europe. Most european sites charge 3-4 times as much as ereader.com :(

EDIT: The VAT is not an issue ereader used to charge 15% VAT which is the european fixed price for international sales on top and it still came in at 7USD.
 
As ereaders become more commonplace publishers are going to find out what the Music and Film Industry did, very quickly. A friend of mine has an ereader, very nice bit of kit (still too expensive for me). He Downloaded 20,000 books off the net, fits on 1 DVD. He'll never have to buy a book again. Couple the ease of distribution of tiny files with stupid prices for legal downloads and you have a recipe for disaster.

The only thing that'll save book publishing is that people like me like the feel of books. Eink is good, but not good enough IMHO.

Nate
 
IIRC at the moment a lot of Ebooks aren't getting variable pricing unlike the print edition, so once the book is released at one price it's unlikely to change, except maybe if the original ebook was released at the same time as the hardback, in which case it'll most likely drop when the paperback version comes out.

The big spat with Amazon a couple of months ago was largely about that variable pricing, the ebook publishers wanted the ability to vary the "RRP" roughly in line with the paper versions (Hardback, paperback, mass market paperback style pricing), and to experiment with different price points.
Amazon wanted to set the Minimum any ebook available on the Kindle could be sold for anywhere, and the price, and pay the Publishers considerably less than normal in percentage terms of the "cover price".

I suspect it's going to take a while for the publishers/retailers selling ebooks over here to start varying the pricing in the same manner as has happened in some places in the states, as they still seem to be trying to get to grips with the whole ebook thing (apparently there are still some publishers/editors/agents in the book/mag biz who require paper versions of everything and some won't accept electronic copies at all!).

It's also worth noting that at the moment the costs of making an ebook version are only actually a couple of pounds less than the cost of the paper version (pretty much everything remains the same up to the point where it's printed), and a large number of the "cheap" new books are either stock that the publisher would otherwise be pulping*, or loss leaders.

Personally I'm hoping they get the pricing sorted out soon, as whilst I love my ereader, at the moment all my paid for content seems to be coming from Baen, which is ok (they publish a lot of books both new, and classic SF that I enjoy, and cheaply), but I would love to be able to more variety cheaply, or at all on the reader.
I would love to be able to put the likes of my Discworld paperbacks out to pasture (or in the loft;)), as at the moment they are taking up a fair chunk of space (I've got most of the DW books in paper, and hard back versions).

*From what i've been reading, publishers often get a high percentage of books sent out as "returns for credit" from the likes of Waterstone after a few weeks/months, and either pulp them, or sell them on at a very large discount to companies who have the space, and don't mind storing them potentially for years.
 
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