So the day before Thanksgiving I finally got my spiffy new Kindle Touch, taking the big plunge into eBooks. So now if I have a Wifi connection somewhere I can buy books and read them almost instantly. Huzzah!
Well the problem as I noted on Michael's blog in a grumpy comment is that the Big Six price their eBooks so outrageously. $13.99 for the new Stephen King book? Are you serious? I did because I had an Amazon gift card from my sister buy the Kindle edition of Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman for a whopping $11.99. I also bought The Hunger Games on sale (I think) for $4.69. And yes I did buy three self-published books (including mine, first of course because I'm self-centered that way) and one small press-published book. Not all for $20, obviously.
Anyway, the price of eBooks is something Writer Beware and I argue about whenever she/they try to shatter people's illusions about eBooks and self-publishing. Most recently was an article about how much it really costs publishers to digitize their backlists. The answer is: a lot. Why? Because publishers are dumb. That's the reason I'm going with.
Because really, how much should it cost to digitize a book? Minimum wage is what, $7.50 still? Something along those lines. So you pay a temp a maximum of $60/day to scan the thing (minimum wage x 8 hours) and format it. If they work on it nonstop (without slacking off as I usually do to read blogs and stuff) it shouldn't take more than a few days. Even if it's a five-day week that's $300.
So if you just paid someone to scan it, maybe format it a little, and load it onto Kindle and other platforms it shouldn't run you that much. Except I bet the stupid publishers aren't paying a temp or their 13-year-old nieces to do it, which would be cheaper. They're probably hiring computer programmers or some highfalutin' firm that specializes in all this crap, who charge a lot more than it needs to be. Because let's face it, big businesses, like the government, can be dumb about this stuff. Also, I'm willing to bet the people in charge of the Big Six don't have a fucking clue what eBooks are or how much it should cost to make one.
What I do know is that self-publishers like me can make an eBook for pretty much nothing. It might have taken me an hour or so to format my Word file of Where You Belong to load it on Kindle. Though in all honestly my book looks like shit. I have to try reformatting it or something. But Rusty's novelette A Dead God's Wrath looks pretty nice. It even has purdy pictures in it at the end! I bet it didn't take him too long to make that. And unless he wants to pay himself, it didn't cost much either. So what's the deal that me or Rusty can charge 99 cents for our master works but the Big Six can't?
The other argument the publishers like to make that I love to call bullshit on when Writer Beware posts about it is the idea of you have to include ALL the costs like the advance, marketing, and so forth. Well sure if you were ONLY putting out an eBook that would make sense. If you're still putting out a hardcover and paperback then in cost accounting theory you would spread the cost of the advance, marketing, etc. across all three platforms. So while the eBook might be more, the hardcover and paperback should be significantly less. Are publishers charging less for hardcovers and paperbacks accordingly? I doubt it.
Because if some sucker is willing to pay $13.99 for the new Stephen King book on Kindle, why the hell not charge that much? It's like Nike sneakers: if some kid is willing to pay $150 for sneakers that cost $15 for some schmo in China to make, why not charge that much? So are publishers dumb about the costs of the product or are they evil geniuses? I don't know. I'd love to get a look at their books, though.
That is a whopping price tag for an ebook. I bought Haruki Murukami's book IQ84 on my Nook this weekend and it was $14.00...a ripoff in my opinion. Oh well...they did have to translate it from Japanese which is no easy task. But what can you do?
ReplyDeleteI appreciate cheaper ebooks for sure. I guess the proper word is "affordable". "Cheap" just has a negative connotation to it.
Good to see you've taken the "kindle" plunge. My dad really enjoys his. "Purdy" by the way, brings images to my mind of a guy playing a banjo over a bridge in Mississippi ala "Deliverance".
I think the pricing for books from big six publishers are inflated to protect sales for hardcovers and trade paperbacks. The fact that people are still paying those prices is why in the last quarter that the big 6 (all of them, I think) reported huge and rising profits. It costs nothing and the royalties they pay to authors is a pittance. That's pure profit.
ReplyDeleteFormatting issues come up all the time in indie books though, some folks are better than others at producing a readable ebook than others. It doesn't help that Amazon's Word to Mobi converter stinks. Thay could do way better.
Not even all print books cost that much. I am fortunate to have Photoshop freely at my disposal and the wherewithal to set up an e-book to look nice, and there is little point in dishing out dollars and dollars to have someone else do it.
ReplyDeleteSelf-publishing is very much a do-it-yourself occupation, and doing the formatting yourself is easily possible and fairly cheap (if not free).
...Also, based on the preview at your Amazon page, the book isn't that bad-looking on the inside.
So much to comment on!
ReplyDeleteFirst, the sunk costs of publishing are actually pretty high. I once argued that Black Eyed Peas should give away their albums since they made so much money already, but then realized that if they did that, all the people who work in recording studios, A&R men, and Target stores would make less money. So now I think that Black Eyed Peas should themselves make less money per album, which would reduce the cost of the albums slightly. Of course, most rock stars make their money from touring, not the albums.
Anyway, in publishing, ebooks are subsidizing hardcovers, which is still where the money is. Here's an interesting article:
http://gigaom.com/2011/03/23/marc-parrish-barnes-noble/
that highlights the problems: only 5% of people read more ebooks than hardcovers, and bookstores are increasingly just advertising. If you've shopped for books on your kindle, you know why: you probably went looking for a specific book instead of wandering around stacks of books looking for something to catch your eye.
So publishers, for now, seem focused on supporting the old, physical world of publishing, and ebook sales (which are virtually free) subsidize those.
There's also the "value" model: I price my books at 99 cents because, hey, I want them to sell -- but some people won't buy Dollar Store books because they think they're value-less. (I ran into this in the law biz: if you charge less than other lawyers, people think you're no good. They measure worth by how much you want them to pay you.)
Then there's the fact that the Kindle was in part a grudge match between Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, and that publishers hated Amazon for selling books at $9.99; Apple and five big publishers. That's still ongoing:
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2011/10/did-apple-collude-with-publishers-to-fix-prices-on-e-books276.html
And one argument is that Apple and the publishers didn't like lower profits from the Amazon model. Publishers typically get, now, 52.5% of the cover price, and 52.5% of $13.99 is better than of $9.99.
And the e-book sales are not offsetting huge losses in print sales:
http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/warning-signs-for-large-publishers-in-august-aap-figures/
Print sales are down for big publishers and ebook sales are not making up the difference despite explosive growth. Why?
'Cause of you.
Seriously: Self-publishers are taking market share away from big publishers. Almost all of the top 10 e-book genre books are self/indie published. And the publishers' response to falling profits is the same one that many businesses use: When sales go down, jack up the price and hope to make up the difference.
Publishing is going to end, as we know it, soon. Think of the last time you saw a "music store" of any kind. I'm not sure I've even seen a CD in the past year, other than the one I got for my birthday last January.
Once publishers think of a better way to advertise their books, bookstores will be dead. Once authors realize that publishers taking 52.5% of their profits may not be in their best interests, the publishing model will change. And while we may, as Garrison Keillor once said, eventually be a nation of authors each of whom has 12 readers and $1.67 in annual profits, if there's good books out there, I'm not going to be crying in my soup because John Grishman doesn't have a pile of money to roll around in.
Speaking of crying in your soup, you know what's a great way to not be depressed at the holidays? Wishing some kids Merry Christmas and maybe winning $20.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.thinkingthelions.com/2011/11/superxmas-day-2-today-i-dream-big-and.html
Well, I was going to comment, but Briane took most of what I was going to say. Basically, e-books from the big 6 cost so much because they are subsidizing their traditional publishing with money from e-books. They've admitted it more than once. Until they actually make the decision to adapt to the changing publishing world, things will stay the same. If they don't adapt, they'll go extinct. My money is on extinct, because dinosaurs don't adapt well.
ReplyDeleteI didn't even bother with Preston & Child's last book because it was fifteen dollars for the eBook. $7.99 is reasonable and I've gone as high as ten bucks, but that's my limit.
ReplyDeleteMy publisher released my first book at $4.99 for the eBook and it eventually came down to $2.99. I'm sure the price had a lot to do with its launch onto the Amazon Best Seller list - and the reason it's still hanging out in the top science fiction books almost three months later. Most of the books on that list are under ten bucks.
The big publishers can protect their hardbacks all they want, but I'm not ever buying one again. And if given the choice between buying three or four eBooks or buying just one, I'll take several over one.