Why are ebooks so costly? can you buy ebooks cheaper for your ipad and kindle?
Well I for one have asked the question many times myself. I do apprecaite the article and some of the points it makes but I don’t buy it. First of all I would like the analysis come from an independent auditor not a publisher. I think one of the biggest issues to start with is the retail price of a physical book “depending on the format.” I find it hard to belive that the majority of physical books cost $20 to start with. Of course there are many things to take into account here and without knowing how they are counting this it could be anything.
Generally I tend to think of ebooks and popular paper backs when comaring physical books and ebooks. Sure hard copies sell for $20 but the paper back of the same book is often $10 or less. When you buy a hard cover you are buying the quality compared to a paper back. An ebook can only be considred the equivalent of a paper back since you are looking at the basic available text for reading in both cases (enhanced books would be like a hard cover and I would expect those to be more expensive but they are not widely available yet).
So where does this $20 figure come from? Text books, photo books, map books, technical books? Sure those things can cost a fortune and when figured into book prices would pull the avereage way up but how many of those books are being sold on ereaders? I would think you would have to look at non-reference books (including text books) sold in high volumes from major retailers and then find the average price of those books being sold for a comparisson with the tyoes of books people are buying on ereaders to get an accurate price.
In my mind that puts us back to comparing popular paper backs to ebooks and I would think $10 would be a better basis. So at a minimum I would think that ebooks should be 12% cheaper than phsyical books.
There are other issues I have with the article such as having to deal with mutiple edistributors being a cost. Don’t they also have to seal with mutiple physical distributors? And if it is so expensive to deal with the other 15 edistributors that we haven’t heard of why bother?
Is preparing eboks in 6 major formats really so difficult? Don’t phsysical books have different formats that must be prepared (hard cover, paperback, set binding, easy to read, etc.)? I guess nobody has to proof the physical copies that come back from the printers either and no time is spent on quality control of physical copies.
To say that these are extra costs is sort of rediculous since physical books would require the same sort of attention and issues with ebooks can be resolved more quickly and efficiently. Imagine finding a typo in a book after running thousands of copies vs finding a typo in an e book. Which do you think is easier and cheaper to correct.
The best part is I have a solution and its called Buy Ebooks Online.
In a nutshell BEO is simply access to a online library of titles, being an online library it can be accessed from anywhere in the world even when your on your holidays and need more reading material.
The service costs at present $19.99 which allows access to the online library and allows users to browse and select any book from the ebook library. This cost is not a recurring subscription either, it is a one off fee and this grants A LIFETIME MEMBERSHIP to the user.
The library is regularly updated and new titles and recent bestsellers are included in the membership. All the books on the site also have the owners permission to be published so there are no issues around copyright or legality with this service.
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