In today’s New York Times, there’s an interesting article on e-reading consumers resistance to books priced above the $9.99 standard price point that Amazon has established. What surpised me is that in the case of new releases otherwise only in hardcover, Amazon is paying the same $13 price to publishers and is selling at a lost to encourage people to pick up readers. The idea of a $9.99 e-book, at least for new releaes, is NOT something publishers seem keen on:
“The concept that because a book is an e-book it should automatically be priced significantly lower than a paper book is one we don’t agree with,” said Carolyn Reidy, chief executive of Simon & Schuster. “What a consumer is buying is the content, not necessarily the format.”
As a Kindle 2 owner, I confess that I balk a little when I see books priced above $9.99. Even that price seems high at times, as when buying a 150 page YA book that retails for half the cost of a standard hardcover. As a writer, however, the arguments against cheap e-books are all too compelling. After all, only 12.5% of a book’s cost goes into manufacturing the physical goods and distributing it. The rest goes into paying the writer, editors, marketing staff and the general overhead for keeping the publishing engine running.
Certainly much of that engine can run more efficiently in a digital age, whether its writers handling much of their own PR, or reforming the wasteful system of returns that sends countless books to landfills or shifts them between warehouses.
But putting aside the actual costs of producing a book, there is still the intangible concept of “value” that publishers can’t control. A book placed on a shelf is a form of self-expression; an e-book on a kindle is private. A book can be gifted, shared or sold; an e-book is a one-time license. Even if 99% of books are only read once (if that) by the original purchaser (I’m pulling that number out of my ass, but who knows, maybe i’ts close to accurate), that perception of value is hard to let go of.
This concept of persistant value isn’t just a monetary thing, either. A physical book will generally stay in print for as long as it is viable to keep up the costs of manufacturing and destributing to demand. When books lose their audience and fall out of print, they become scarce. Old books, even if demand is low, become “rare.” Each object has its own history. There’s no reason for rare e-books to exist. There’s no reason for e-books to go out of print! In this reality, every book has equal permanance. At the same time, the quality bar for what constitutes a thing worth of permanence is thrown out the window. This is a good thing! It is wonderful that forgotten authors can be rediscovered, reanalyzed and even remixed (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, anyone?)
A year or two from now, I’ll probably have enough blog posts to fill a book or two. That content is free now, and theoretically will remain free and accessible for perpetuity (yikes, that’s scary when you think about it). In recent years, blogs migrating to print has been a lucrative publishing niche, whether it be dooce doing a biograpy, stuffwhitepeoplelike, or any number of webcomics turning traffic into print advance. What happens in a reading reality where ebooks are the norm? Let’s say I’m an aspiring genre author and I want to get some advice from a veteran.I could pay $10 for Stephen King’s On Writing, or read old blog entries by John Scalzi. Right now, King’s book is a self-contained unit of some 200 pages that isn’t likely to fall out of print physically or digitally anytime soon. Scalzi’s articles, however, have the benefit of a back-and-forth report with readers and the Z-axis of time to give them added value. I wonder, how would someone with no prior prejudice for print over digital equate the value of those works, and what will that mean for the future of publishing? It doesn’t seem that far-fetched to have blog archives (perhaps edited an annotated) start appearing alongside traditional “books.”
The obvious answer to all these questions most likely involves a tiered system. Whether the value is placed on time (read it first!), depth (read it ALL, ie bonus features), merit (read the BEST), duration (read it once or read it forever), or more likely, a combination of the above, will probably shake out in the next few years. It will also be interesting to see how much pricing and tier flexibility there will be.
In the meantime, I just have to believe that working as a writer, refining my craft and coming up with new stories that (hopefully) people will want to read, will continue to be a viable career… at least for the next 30 years. After that, it’s somebody else’s problem.
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This is a great post!
I wonder what Jareth would pay for Return to Labyrinth 3…
How has your experience been with the Kindle? While I see many people around me scrambling for one of these, I just can’t bring myself to be interested. One of the things I love the most about books is sitting down with a warm cup of whatever while it’s cold outside, curled up with a good (literal) page-turner. While I’m as internet and, generally, digitally-obsessed as the next person here, I guess I’m a bit old-fashioned in that way. I love having my books on my bookshelf and sharing them (and showing them off!) to other people.
For example, in a secondhand store here, I found a box of Isaac Asimov books, printed from roughly 1975-1980. The box said 5 euro a piece for 20 or so books and I thought that was a wonderful steal, so I happily went up to the register. The lady charged me only 5.50 euro for the entire box, presumably because they were in English, and being in a tiny, secondhand store in the Netherlands here, I highly doubt another person would have been as interested in them as I was. So I have a full shelf now of barely read Asimov books that have that nice old book smell, and I have to admit, having them is a little bit of a point of pride. It just wouldn’t be the same to show them to someone on a Kindle and be like “Look, I got these files at a great discount!” It’s just different.
I think the physical possession of books is just something I’m more comfortable with spending money on. There’s already the Kindle 2, how long before Kindle 3, 4, 5, etc and you’re suddenly stuck with a version 5 modifications behind? I feel more comfortable hauling around a $10 paperback to read on the train than a $90 piece of electronics. My house flooding or burning down is pretty much the only way something will permanently damage my books to the point of needing to replace them. However, I can easily drop my Kindle, have it crash horribly or something, and be forced into $90 replacement to read my beloved books.
The fact that this is a service provided with no guarantee of longevity is probably my biggest reason for balking. I know that, barring the above catastrophes, in 30 years, I’ll still be holding and treasuring my Return to Labyrinth manga, but I have no guarantee whatsoever that the Kindle service is going to last that long. I may end up with a piece of equipment that’s as useful as a 5″ floppy disk nowadays. I’d much rather curl up with my physical book and keep on happily turning pages. 
You’re absolutely right that files purchased now for the Kindle (or 2 or DX) are destined to be obsolete, so if you’re buying now, it really only makes sense for convenience. The idea of “my copy” of a file just doesn’t hold up in the way that one can possess a physical object. Movies, music and games already have a long history of legalese treating their use as a license to use, rather than a sale of content. Kindle files are very restrictive right now in their use, and with the format so young, will probably be replaced by a new format very soon. Instead of thinking “I’m building a digital library,” you have to think “I am paying $380 for the convenience or having books on demand wherever I go. ” For me, I’ve mostly cut back on my compulsion to “own” every book, movie or game that I like, but I still make exceptions for favorites. The kindle is a good alternative to buying books I’d probably only read once, but it can never replace holding the books I treasure.
Everyone is talking about Kindles, and I’m still reading Project Gutenberg material on my ancient Palm pilot. ^^; That’s just about the only reason I would utilize these devices- as an archive for free and public domain works that would be expensive to accumulate in print. I agree with your opinion about books on a shelf. I like people to see that I have classic things like The Good Earth and 1984 alongside my comics and vampire fiction.
Jake – you may be into this article: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/05/e-book-design/
Jess,
That is a good article! I completely get what they’re talking about with the importance of design and fonts informing the reading experience and that being lost in a current gen e-books. That’s another of those hard-to-place-a-value-on aspects of print books that makes it so hard to compare the reading values of print vs. digital. It’ll be interesting to see how e-book design evolves…
I absolutely love my Kindle, but I do still buy books that I want to share, or books that don’t work in e-format, such as Burn this Journal, Creepy Cute Crochet, various manga books, and picture books like the Postsecret books. And while I agree that we, as consumers purchase content, you can’t deny that we’ve been trained to consider format vs. pricing by the industry itself, seeing how you can purchase a hardcover book for anywhere from 19.99-29.99, but if you wait a year they generally re-release a title in paperback for 6-7 dollars. If the industry really believes we are only paying for content, then why the different releases at different times?