seancregan:

I’ve been terribly quiet recently (working and/or installing a shower), but here’s my two cents (which at 35% means only 0.7 cents of it are mine, but hey) on ebooks, value and pricing. Specifically as it applies to you and I, knocking our shit out for people to buy via Kindle and Nook and LCD…

This seems worth the read to me.

I’ve been an ebook reader for some time.  I won’t say that I was an early adopter, because there are people out there who were reading ebooks on PCs or on Palm Pilots before most people had realized that you could use “e” as a prefix.  But I bought a Sony Reader very soon after it came out in the U.S., long before it came out in Canada.  I love the things, and have been in the die-hard, “Unless your book comes out in electronic format, it’s unlikely that I’m going to read it,” camp almost since I got the device.  (For the record, I now do most of my eReading on my iPad, and have long-term-loaned the Sony Reader to a friend, but the principle is the same.)  

I’m also a slow reader, so I don’t go through anywhere near as many books as some people I know do.  As such, I’m probably willing to pay more per book, because they last me longer and the charges don’t mount up as quickly.

That said, I think there are a few things in this article that seem to ring very true to my experience as a reader.  The first is that I have a far larger collection of books available to my on my device than I will ever read.  A good number of these are the free classics that came with the Sony Reader purchase.  I share my Sony eBook Store account with two other people (this is explicitly allowed by Sony) such  that we can share all of our books between us, etc., and I’ve bought two Sony Readers.  Each device purchase got us credit for 100 free classics, so we had credit for 400 free classic books on the account.  I think we’ve collectively used maybe 30 or 40 of those credits.  But still, that’s 30 or 40 books right there.  Then, because I do share the account, there are all the books the other people on the account bought.  And then there are the books that I bought but haven’t gotten around to reading or only read a little bit of then set aside or whatever.  So in total, maybe over a hundred books waiting on my device to read, maybe a hundred and fifty.  A lot of these are ones I’m not particularly interested in, but some are ones I’d like to read someday but haven’t felt like reading thus far.  Also throw in that I can take ebooks out of the library for free, and that extends that potentially ad infinitum.  So when people talk about 99 cent books enticing in new readers, while I think there’s some validity to that — if I see a book that sounds very interesting and it’s only 99 cents I’m more likely to try it — I don’t go aimlessly looking for cheap books all that often anymore, because of the massive volume of free material I’ve got at my fingertips.  The cheap first book price is usually something that comes in to play once I’ve already decided that I’m interested in a book or an author and went searching for them.  And once I’ve decided that I’m interested in a book or an author, you don’t have to come down to 99 cents to entice me — I’m perfectly content taking a chance on something I’ve already developed a certain level of interest in for $3.50 or $4.50 or $5.50.

I do chafe at introductory prices of $14.99 or $16.99 for ebooks, and I downright balk at the few that launch at $23.99 or such prices.  But I think that $9.99 is a completely fair price to ask for an ebook, especially if you drop it down to $6.50 or so after it’s been out for, say, three or six months.  (Maybe $9.99 launch, $7.99 after three months, $6.50 after six months?)  After all, I’m buying a lot of entertainment.  I tend to use the movie index (authors seem to like the coffee index, but I don’t think it translates well) for entertainment.  I’ve found that I’m willing to spend about $14 on a movie ticket.  (After that, I tend to start to balk.)  And I’ll spend $10 - $12 without thinking much about it.  That’s often for about 90 minutes of entertainment, but let’s round it up to 2 hours because I do like long movies, and even for shorter ones, the overall experience lasts a bit longer.  So let’s say that there’s a sweet spot around $6 an hour there.  Now, I don’t know about you, but it takes me a hell of a lot longer than an hour to read most books.  If I read an hour and a half during my commute (45 minutes morning and evening) each day, it will take me a couple of months to finish a short, light novel.  So we’re looking at maybe 60 hours of reading.  (As I said, I read very slowly.)  At $6 an hour, I should be happy paying $360 for a book.  Now, clearly that’s not true, and to be fair, movies are a very compressed, highly targeted, multimedia entertainment form.  But if I pay $10 for 60 hours of entertainment, that’s a pretty sweet deal — around 17 cents an hour.  It’s like paying 34 cents to see a movie.

There really is an idea in people’s minds that e-media of just about any sort is valueless, and I think that the more we promote that idea, the poorer our appreciation of the cultural weight of creativity becomes.  I have had endless discussions with people that focus on the media itself.  When vinyl switched to CDs, people kept asking why you had to pay $10 - $15 for an album when the disc only costs $1, as if what you were buying was the disc, not the stuff on it (and surrounding it, in terms of artwork and so on).  When you read the article above and look at the economics of it and think that professional authors are running the numbers with an optimistic goal of being able to barely squeak by well below the poverty line, it doesn’t seem right at all.  And yet, now that we buy things electronically, you see the same arguments coming up again and again — why do we have to pay $6 for a book when the bits of data are essentially free (not strictly true, but that’s how people look at it).  I mean, that’s more or less how people justify piracy — that the bits are free, so why pay for it?  As if the content encoded by the bits is just a meaningless byproduct of amassing some bits, and the work that went into it isn’t what you’re valuing. And it also makes one wonder where we expect our great art (or even just our great entertainment) to come from, when the people can’t make a good enough living to do it full-time, for the most part, and very few authors do.

Note that I do know that I’m writing this all from the perspective of someone who has money to spend, and not everybody does.  I think that that’s why it’s critical that institutions like libraries be kept alive into the digital age — to allow access to media for everybody.  But the numbers above apply to me, as someone who *can* afford to buy books.

This has been a really disorganize rambling, but I have to say that I also love the suggestion of the post’s author to come out with the inexpensive editions (paperback) first and then later release the hardcovers with lots of extras (or their ebook equivalents) as collector’s editions for the hardcore fans, rather than coming out with the hardcover and pricing it out of most people’s reach for quite a while, then coming out with the affordable edition later. 

Anyway, since I’ve lost all semblance of focus here, I’ll end on that note!