Are you insulted?
Apparently, publishers are pricing eBooks in a silly way, and it’s insulting to the reader.
Certainly, people do get hot under the collar about eBook pricing; when Amazon tried to start selling them over ten dollars a shot, there was a minor revolution.
Well, okay. There’s definitely some silliness around – my book was briefly available as an eBook for two different prices – hard and soft cover eBook. Eep. It’s not intentional, it’s just the kind of thing which happens when large companies start getting into new areas.
It’s also true that there are no printing, warehousing, or shipping costs associated with eBooks, although there are presumably infrastructural costs of other sorts – even if they are likely to be lower.
However…
I think it’s also the case that the last ten, fifteen years has encouraged us to believe that stuff should basically be free. It was the time of the big discount, because all you had to do to make money was watch the market spiral upward.
It probably should have been obvious that that wasn’t sustainable. In fact, it was obvious, but no one really wanted to talk about it.
Talking to a couple of publishers recently, I’ve been surprised by how the cost of a book breaks down; I had assumed that the physical costs were considerably higher than they are. According to what they told me, the bulk of the cost part of a book’s jacket price is operational – editing, publicity, and the business of running a publishing house. If a book costs twenty five dollars, one U.S. editor said to me, only a few bucks of that is print and paper. At which point, of course, eBooks just aren’t that much cheaper than dead tree books to make.
So I find myself looking at the ten dollar eBooks and thinking: huh. That cannot possibly cover everyone’s costs.
One way of looking at that is to say that it’s not relevant – it’s not a question of what the costs are, but what the market will pay. I’m not comfortable with that. The market can be an idiot. Large groups of people make many decisions very well, but they’re not always rational about what they should pay for things – ask the State of California (2). Given the choice between raising taxes and getting a tax break, people will generally go for the break. They will then also – and here’s California’s problem – vote for a bunch of really expensive stuff they would like for the government to do immediately.
That kind of thinking has been encouraged for a decade or more, and – surprise – it doesn’t work.
So I expect you’re wondering – as George C. Wellbeloved would have said – what I think about all this. Well, I think eBooks are priced in silly ways and I think they need to be made more amazing. I think DRM is a pain in the arse and I don’t see that it works, and at the same time it stops me from doing with eBooks what I would do with paper copies. I also think that the market is presently executing the newspaper and brought us all the fun of watching pensions and 401Ks vanish in the mist, so I’m not really impressed with its financial acumen.
I think we, collectively, need to acknowledge that stuff costs money.
Amazingly, at the bright, shiny beginning of the 2000s, we’re learning once again that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I was ducked into a big department store on Tuesday because I had quarter of an hour and I saw a winter coat, absolutely perfect for me, made by a really cool designer, on sale for £300. That’s a lot of money, but it’s much, much less than the original price of the item, which was £3000. Yep. 10%, people. (Particularly good since I’m still sulking about the non-existence of the Gone-Away Coat.)
So I thought, okay, that’s great. I hadn’t come in for a coat and I didn’t really want to carry it home, but when something is in the perfect size and looks amazing and has been reduced from a stratospheric price to something manageable and will last you for a decade or more, that’s a moment to make a few compromises.
Except it turns out I misread the sticker price – it was £500. Yup. 16%. And I looked at the guy behind the counter and said thanks, and walked out, because I didn’t want to pay that much for a coat.
Well, okay. On the one hand I was right. That extra two hundred quid made a huge difference. It wasn’t what I was prepared to pay, it was nearly twice as much as I thought we were talking about.
But I was also pathetically, ludicrously wrong. That coat was worth a huge amount more than I was being asked to pay. The designer and the shop were taking a loss selling it at that level, and they were doing so to clear stock. The reduction was massive. I was being a tit. I could probably have bought it at that price, taken it home, and sold it on eBay for twice as much. I ignored what it was in favour of my own perception of what I wanted it to cost.
I am an idiot.
It seems to me that we do this with everything at the moment, and we have to stop. We pretend there are no environmental costs associated with flying, because if we acknowledged them then flights would be more expensive than we want to pay. So essentially, what we are doing every time we fly is taking out a mortgage we already know we can’t pay for and pretending it’s not there.
Does that sound familiar?
So coming back to eBooks…
On the one hand, yes, eBooks need reasonable pricing, and they need to be unshackled from proprietary formats and the rest. But on the other, it’s not a question of what the market will bear, with eBooks or anything else.
We have to learn that things have costs, and those costs are not always mutable, even if that doesn’t suit us.
[++UPDATE++ This conversation became so interesting that I wrote more about it - looking at the downsides of current eBooks and what probably needs doing - here.]
