Are $0.99 E-books The Future?
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E-books are overpriced. That’s at least what the average e-book adopter would claim. Even the thought of Amazon increasing its e-book prices created a big controversy just a few months ago. Some authors and publishers have had this idea that charging over $10 for their e-books can be good for their bottom-line. That is of course not always the case. We have seen this idea in action in Apple’s iOS AppStore. Many developers have managed to make a killing with their $0.99 applications. It is true that we are talking about a different kind of product here. At the same time, this approach could work in the e-book world.
In an interview with Oreilly, Todd Sattersten, the owner of BizBookLab, summed some of the issues publishers face beautifully:
only one factor that matters right now — what print books cost. Customers compare ebooks to their paper-based ancestors, and they long ago concluded they should be cheaper because everything else in their digital lives is cheaper than their physical lives…I am not sure we’ve figured out what the reader should get for $0.99… Our biggest problem is that we keep hanging onto the idea of a book. The word itself is laden with 500 years of meaning… We need some new terminology for electronic products so we can get more creative about what publishing creates and what we can offer readers.
E-book subscription plans could be one way to reduce costs for e-book lovers while getting publishers the compensation they are looking for. The idea of shorter e-books could also work but we do not want some authors to cut corners to sell their works cheaper.
Many publishers complain about e-book piracy but do not take any action whatsoever to combat it with a modern e-book pricing model. No one seems to be asking why some folks choose to pirate e-books instead of purchasing them for their Kindle or iPad. Not every e-book can be priced $0.99. But an aggressive pricing model is worth trying in the e-book industry.
