djonn | The price of (e)books in Netville (Reply)

Other folk with far deeper expertise have been weighing in all weekend on the current fracas between Amazon and Macmillan over ebook pricing. I don't propose to wade into the main discussion here, but there's a side to the matter to which very few of the commentators have been paying attention. It's this: everyone's been discussing e-book pricing as that pricing connects to corresponding print versions of the same text. But not all e-books have corresponding print editions.

This has two consequences.

First, if you're a publisher of original e-books, it makes setting prices complicated. Do you value an original novel-length e-book:
(a) as you would an original print hardcover (price point, $25)
(b) as you would an e-book version of a print hardcover ($10-$15)
(c) as you would a mass market paperback (price point, $6-$8)

Remember here that original e-books have editorial, production, marketing, and distribution costs just as print books do -- and that unlike e-books "piggybacked" on counterpart print editions, they must recoup all of those costs solely via sales of the e-book edition. Two stipulations: (1) production costs of an e-book are different -- instead of typesetting and printing, you're doing design and coding; (2) distribution costs are different; instead of shipping physical books to retail stores, you're paying fees or commissions to online retailers to display and sell your titles. This latter is, of course, where the present Amazon/Macmillan dispute arises...but a publisher of original e-books generally has far less leverage to negotiate terms than a Macmillan does.

Second, an e-book pricing structure that's predicated on the existence of counterpart print editions may well break down if and when -- as many folk hope and/or predict -- major publishers shift toward producing more (or most) content exclusively in electronic form. What happens to e-book prices when/if the market share in book sales shifts so that most people buy e-texts and not hardcovers (as opposed to hardcovers and not e-texts)? Mind, I personally don't expect this to happen anytime soon, but in the medium to long term, consider how much music is now being sold purely in MP3/digital form with no physical media in the picture. It's nowhere near a direct parallel -- there are big differences between book publishing and music publishing -- but it bears consideration.

My direct interest, of course, is that I have a couple of titles available from a publisher of original e-books (the publisher is Uncial Press, and the books are here and here) and I want both my books and my publisher to prosper. But Uncial is just one of a growing number of original e-presses, and my larger concern here is that the present controversy -- for all that it's enormously significant -- is focusing attention on only one segment of a larger and more complicated equation.

And in the context of the present kerfuffle, I find myself more or less rooting for Macmillan, though not perhaps for the reasons others may cite. The lesson here for readers of e-books, I think, is that Amazon isn't and cannot be one's sole source of content -- or even, perhaps, a primary source, for all the popularity of the Kindle. For e-books, it's comparatively easy to find other sources -- or to go directly to the publisher, especially in the case of independent and specialty presses like Uncial. I don't want to kill Amazon, but I definitely do want to encourage online bookbuyers -- and particularly online e-book buyers -- to gravitate toward the independents and the specialty presses, just as we tend to encourage folks to patronize local and specialty booksellers in the Real World™. (And on the Net, you don't have to worry about the cost of gas or whether you'll find a parking space near the front door.)