Does S&S not care about people who read eBooks?

[Thrawn]

Like I said before, anything that is digitally delivered should be SUBSTANTIALLY cheaper than anything physically delivered. Music should be no more than $0.10-$0.25 per song and ebooks should be no more than $3 or $4.

The market disagrees.

Show me people not buying significantly more at his cited price points than at their current ones, and you can make that assertion. Otherwise, it's hard to say that the market disagrees, when the market has never had a chance to voice its opinion on such prices.

But they HAVE experimented with altering prices; in the amazon MP3 store if nothing else, several albums lately have been sold for $5. I've even bought some of them. But we've also seen highly anticipated releases going up in price, which wouldn't happen if there were evidence that that decreased overall profits.

eBooks are still getting established, but I think MP3s are pretty clearly going to stay about where they are for the forseeable future.


Edit: and of course people would buy substantially more at those prices. The question is how much more. Server costs aren't enormous but they do matter, so you'd have to sell a bit more than five times as many MP3s at 20c a pop than you did at 99c a pop in order to make the same amount of money. Do you really see decreasing prices increasing purchasing habits fivefold?

Or, to put it another way, do you see yourself purchasing five times the amount of music if prices were decreased that much?

 

[LightningStorm]

Music should be no more than $0.10-$0.25 per song and ebooks should be no more than $3 or $4.

Curious. Why would music be so much cheaper than books? Music costs a lot more to make than books do.

You wouldn't happen to be measuring it based on the amount of time worth of entertainment it provides you?

 

[cem1701]

The prices for downloadable media can't be that much cheaper than those charged for the physical versions. It still takes the same amount of people to create the content itself. 50 cents savings in printing/distribution/storage costs is feasible, but not $4.

I agree to a certain point, but once the infrastructure is in place, the media can be reproduced a practically no cost

 

[cem1701]

Music should be no more than $0.10-$0.25 per song and ebooks should be no more than $3 or $4.

Curious. Why would music be so much cheaper than books? Music costs a lot more to make than books do.

You wouldn't happen to be measuring it based on the amount of time worth of entertainment it provides you?

Very good point. It changed my mind. ebooks should only be a buck or two

 

[Thrawn]

The prices for downloadable media can't be that much cheaper than those charged for the physical versions. It still takes the same amount of people to create the content itself. 50 cents savings in printing/distribution/storage costs is feasible, but not $4.

I agree to a certain point, but once the infrastructure is in place, the media can be reproduced a practically no cost

The infrastructure still isn't free, and it's still true that a huge percentage of the price of a novel or a CD went towards profit, not manufacturing costs. In fact, it only costs like $2 to produce each CD once everything is set up, so that means that $13 of the CD price is going to profit. So the fact that MP3 albums are $10 is already better than you'd expect.

Your argument is that, since it's cheaper to produce, it should cost less. But that only makes sense if the portion of each sale that goes to profit is the same. As you can see, it's already discounted a lot.

I have a feeling books are the same way. I'd bet that selling eBook versions of hardcovers for $10 is about as low as you can possibly go and still keep the same profit margins. I will admit I have no evidence to back this up at all, though; it's just a hunch.

 

[RobertVA]

A few points to remember:

There are both manufacturing and development/creation costs. Making and shipping a physical stamped CD or printed book (same materials and number of pages) is going to cost the same no matter what the contents are. Negotiated agreements with authors and/or artists (for music and audio books) may involve one time costs and/or per copy payments. One time payments might be distributed in smaller per/unit costs if a larger quantity of units can be sold. Crystal balls might have to be consulted to estimate how much of the origination costs can be applied to each unit (might require or permit adjustment in price after initial release). Customers might be willing to pay more when the product first comes out.

Retail price is often a multiple of wholesale price. Add a dime to the manufacturing and/or shipping costs expect the retail price to rise about $0.20. There will be some demand for sales at brick and mortar retailers (those Luddites that haven't bought e-readers yet), so be careful about discounting direct sales (electronic, CD-audio books or print) so much it destroys you brick and mortar market.

 

[JWolf]

The prices for downloadable media can't be that much cheaper than those charged for the physical versions. It still takes the same amount of people to create the content itself. 50 cents savings in printing/distribution/storage costs is feasible, but not $4.

Some publishers have already stated that it is cheaper to go eBook then it is to go paperback. Yes, the costs to get the book finished are identical. But that's where it ends. The costs to then go digital and deliver it to the public is definitely cheaper. You don't have the costs of paper, the cost of printing, the cost of shipping, the cost of storing in some warehouse, and the cost of the book store to sell the book. You do have the cost to convert it to various digital formats and the cost of DRM and the cost of the servers to store the eBooks on. But that's really about it. The costs to go from finished book to eBook is cheaper. So why charge more then the cost of the paper book? Also, a lot of stores such as Borders give discount coupons on a semi-regular basis. So I really do not see $5 for an eBook when the paperback lists for $7.99 to be unreasonable at all while the paperback is still in print. And once the paperback is out of print, $3 for the eBook is again reasonable.

But charging more for the ebook when we know it costs less to make then the paperback is sill. The eBooks are list priced at $9.99 and the paperbacks at $7.99. Does the entire eBook department at S&S have their heads firmly planted up their backside?

 

[Smiley]

I agree that selling for over the cover price of the printed book is ridiculous. I was responding to the claims that eBooks should be no more than $3 or $4. I remember the discussions about whether nonfiction Trek books could do better as eBooks, and one of the reasons given is that the vast majority of the costs of making any book happen before the printing stage. Some bookstores may give coupons that basically let customers have a book at wholesale prices, but that's just a variant on the loss leader strategy.

Even if Trek eBooks could sell for $3 apiece, I don't think there would be much of a spike in sales. Most people interested in Trek books are likely not deterred by the price point. We're still not at the point where eBooks are having a huge impact on casual buyers, so that market would not grow by any significant degree either.

 

[Thrawn]

JWolf, it would appear they may be listening - Troublesome Minds is the only MMPB since the start of the year to be priced at $9.99, including a $7.99 price for the forthcoming Losing The Peace.

 

[JWolf]

JWolf, it would appear they may be listening - Troublesome Minds is the only MMPB since the start of the year to be priced at $9.99, including a $7.99 price for the forthcoming Losing The Peace.

Yes, I did notice that after you mentioned it. I hope this sticks. So with the discounts we can sometimes get at eBook shops, the price will once again be reasonable.

 

[terpette]

First, not everyone who buys ebooks have the intention to pirate them.

I'd argue that most people who buy ebooks don't pirate them. I'm tired of companies penalizing us because they're paranoid about online media. Charging $1 or $2 over the price of a dead-tree copy is highway robbery, and just ensure that S&S won't get ANY of my money. I'll go to the library or the second-hand bookstore. I need something cheaper than dead-tree, and ebooks SHOULD be cheaper. Online music is cheaper, after all.

Ok, rant over. I really like reading ebooks on my PDA at work. Can't really do that with a paperback.

Karen

 

[JWolf]

First, not everyone who buys ebooks have the intention to pirate them.

I'd argue that most people who buy ebooks don't pirate them. I'm tired of companies penalizing us because they're paranoid about online media. Charging $1 or $2 over the price of a dead-tree copy is highway robbery, and just ensure that S&S won't get ANY of my money. I'll go to the library or the second-hand bookstore. I need something cheaper than dead-tree, and ebooks SHOULD be cheaper. Online music is cheaper, after all.

Ok, rant over. I really like reading ebooks on my PDA at work. Can't really do that with a paperback.

Karen

Well from what I am seeing now, it looks like S&S may have gotten the message and is lowering the prices of their eBooks to $7.99 and then given the discounts at various online eBook shops, it will be reasonable once again. But I have noticed that if you shop outside of S&S's website, you will find more formats available. We have PDF & eReader sold on S&S's site. And then there is Mobipocket and now ePub. In the US, I've only seen ePub available at BooksOnBoard. But I'm thinking ePub might be in shops outside the US where ePub is favored. I'm interested in seeing what happens with the next book due at the end of the month.

 

[Anika Hanson]

Im so angry about this. I mean one of the reason I bought my iphone was so that I could read star trek ebooks. I managed to buy 2 and now I can't buy anymore because of the geographical restrictions. I managed to buy the entire star trek book collection as ebooks on a disc on ebay, but when the new books are released I wont be able to get them. I really hope they sort this out soon. I just dont see the logic in this.

 

[JWolf]

You bought illegal eBooks on eBay. S&S does not sell on eBay. Have you tried shops like BooksOnBoard?

 

[DiSiLLUSiON]

I regularly buy and read eBooks, mostly because I don't have the space to put them if they were all paperbacks.

But I only buy those that are available (or easily converted to) a simple text format. I don't want to have to use or install a special program, I don't want to have to buy an expensive reader, I don't want to view it in Acrobat, I simply want to open it up in Notepad or the like and set the font and corps size exactly to my liking so I can comfortably read it. In those rare cases that I couldn't find a format that could be converted (due to copy protection or the like), I have resorted to other means of procuring said book. Means that the publishers or writers don't see a penny of, and that's a real shame, because I'd much rather simply buy it from them, if only to make my conscience feel better.

But it's also a real shame that some of those publishers force readers to install buggy software, to buy an expensive reader (so that when they do, they can't afford any actual eBooks any longer) or to view the book in a font or size that they can't easily read. Some don't seem to understand that pixels aren't the same as dots; printed text is much finer and easier to read then text on a monitor; fonts get all garbled up because the resolution simply isn't there. To comfortably read text on a monitor you need different fonts then for print. In a book, you'd need a serif font; it lets your eyes follow the words easier. On a screen, it's counter-productive since on a small resolutions, the serifs distort the font's lettershapes. That, and the fact that black text on a completely white background isn't very good for your eyes. Books don't have these kind of problems, but that doesn't mean that users should put up with it. Especially seeing as there are publishers out there who charge almost the same price as with their regular pockets.

The eBooks that can be easily converted (thus without serious copy protection or the use of proprietary formats) seem to lessen every day. So yes, I assume a lot of publishers don't actually care about their customers who read eBooks; they'd rather have them buy the paperbacks. Even when they're long out of print, apparently.

Fortunately, not every publisher has such practices.

 

[JWolf]

It looks like Unworthy was converted from a PDF copy given some of the formatting errors I am seeing. Why would S&S do that? That is a stupid way to make eBooks. It's like we are second class citizens to them.

 

[T'deD'Edkeid'Ende'Dejdid]

Between booksonboard.com, fictionwise.com and bn.com, I'm able to get the ebook version of the latest trek book. I gave up on S&S years ago.

 

[JWolf]

Between booksonboard.com, fictionwise.com and bn.com, I'm able to get the ebook version of the latest trek book. I gave up on S&S years ago.

I got my copy of Unworthy from Fictionwise. I did convert it to ePub and was then able to fix most (if not all) of the errors I noticed including spelling captain as captian.

 

[Thrawn]

^ I don't think it was intentional neglect. S&S has recently gone through a second enormous wave of layoffs and a total restructuring. I'm sure that the errors are just a result of work being hurried or moved between different people in all the chaos.

 

[Sci]

It's like we are second class citizens to them.

Yes, that's right, you're a second-class citizen because S&S produces a product whose quality you find sub-par.