I tend to buy physical books and media. Every once in a while I'll look into an ebook version if I don't want to house the book after I read it. But the high price of ebooks sends me to the library, where I can read the physical book and return it afterwards. So, I've never bought an ebook, even though I'll search them out a few times a year.
This is certainly an interesting discussion. I’ve never really read e-books, I don’t like to read on a screen. I have taken to checking out audio books from the library, which is a medium I have come to love! I am able to “read” books so much faster, especially since I have discovered that you can change the speed. But my point in commenting, was to equate the expense of e-books with the expense of children’s books. Most picture books in the US have an initial print run in hardcover, and increasingly are $20. A year or two later, they might get released in paper back, and the price goes down to about half that. There are the smaller publishers that typically release the hardcover and the paperback simultaneously as my publisher, Reycraft, did with my debut picture book, A Walk Through the Redwoods. I really appreciated the paperback version. It is $10.95, as opposed to the $19.95 for the hardcover. And as such, I have had numerous friends who have purchased multiple copies of the paperback to give away to friends with children-- something they would not have been able to do, if it was only available in hardcover. Consequently, I was recently in London, in the children’s section of the bookstore, about 90% of the picture books were paperback-- including the new releases. Hardcovers were hard to come by. Paperback just makes so much more sense for a children’s book. The cheaper price point makes it more accessible to a wider audience. Not to mention as a former preschool teacher, the dust cover/jacket on a hardcover picture book often got in the way, was ripped or torn or even lost. And most hardcovers, don’t have the title etc. printed on the hardback, so you don’t know what the book actually is! Don’t get me wrong, there is a place for a hardcover picture book-- it is a work of art in its own right. And they certainly shouldn’t be done away with. But a paperback, is less costly to print, I assume, therefore the cheaper price, and is more economical for everyone. I would make this same argument for adult books too. Why do we need the hardcover in the first print run? They are more expensive, heavier, take up more room when you buy them, and I think make it harder to read on the go as you can’t fold the cover back and is difficult to hold in one hand, when for example standing on the subway. I understand publishing is a business, but the margins are already so small, so wouldn’t you want quantity to raise your income? Thus a cheaper price point would allow that quantity without any extra work being done, whether that is an ebook or a paperback.
Hardcovers are going to become a smaller and smaller part of publishing, I argue, mainly because of printing issues (in the US at least). The margins on hardcovers are significantly better than on paperbacks, which is why they continue, but fewer people buy them. I agree with you that paperbacks originals make more sense--and that's what Belt has always done, with a few exceptions.
This is a super smart commentary, and I wish the fear-based pricing model based on perceived human behavior (folk logic) would change with our data-backed times. I started my career in publishing, and so many decisions were made based on the fear that audiences would change their behaviors to something Not Books, when in fact audiences act in many different unpredictable ways. Some prefer newer tech and others prefer print. Some prefer to shop on Amazon, but others prefer to avoid it. The industry can accomodate both. I don't think bookstores would see much of a hit at all at this point if ebook prices were cheaper, but authors would definitely receive more royalties, and considering writers make a pittance compared to other industries but buy more books once they have the money, that's a rising tide that lifts all the boats.
IMO we've plateaued as far as digital behavior goes: there are some people who prefer ebooks and others who prefer physical books. I don't read on a kindle because I get such pleasure holding physical books, and reading on a device just doesn't do it for me. But if authors can make more royalties by selling more copies of cheaper ebooks, then that would be amazing.
It seems like you have a perfect venue for conducting this experiment, lowering the price of certain titles while keeping others constant (or even raising a few), just to see. I await the results! :-)
While Bookbub et al. do a big marketing push and have a self-selected group of customers primed to buy, those one-time events can't be compared to long term price reductions of eBooks.
In economic terms, you are suggesting that books are a highly elastic product--lowering prices by 50% will increase demand more than 100% (so that total dollars go up--the ultimate goal--rather than down). The evidence is that other than big bestsellers, books are more like luxury goods, with inelastic demand where changing prices don't significantly affect sales.
That means most sales are to people who already wanted the book or had heard of it. The exact price isn't so important.
Your argument is that if eBooks were cheaper, you'd sell more eBooks. Certainly true but, I think, probably not true enough because the market for eBooks is not infinite. If one publisher lowers prices to (say) $4.99 across the board and sees a big increase in unit sales (though I doubt total profit), cannibalizing sales from other publishers, it might force all prices down. Dropping the average price of an eBook by 50% isn't likely to double sales because most people have about as many books as they can handle, especially after the initial "Sale!" rush is over. Lowering the price of books isn't likely to significantly expand the pool of regular book buyers. There are already libraries where books are free and used books that are much less than cover price - the book market already serves people with real sensitivity to price.
If lower prices automatically significantly increased sales, the used bookstores of America would be empty, but instead they are all full and most have another store's worth of inventory in an off-site location.
If one believes the "wisdom of crowds", then the fact that most publishers follow the same pricing model isn't necessarily collusion, it could be because that model is the most profitable overall. I suspect that someone at every publishing house has had ideas about lowering prices and has tried it or some other experiment and they found it doesn't work. Everyone in publishing is aware of (relatively) big sales of $1.99 eBooks for certain authors and if they thought it could be replicated, they'd have $1.99 divisions. Instead, when someone succeeds at that (e.g., Colleen Hoover; Andy Weir) mainstream publishers move them into the commercial publishing world, not the other way around. Colleen Hoover is making WAAAAY more money as part of mainstream publishing than she ever did as a self-published author precisely because her books are much more expensive, not because they got cheaper.
I get what you are saying, but I am arguing that there isn't one book market but several different ones. Used bookstores only sell print books, so they aren't part of my argument about ebooks.
I also don't agree with this: "Dropping the average price of an eBook by 50% isn't likely to double sales because most people have about as many books as they can handle" because ebook readers tend also to be voracious readers. Especially in genre! Readers of Colleen Hoover, say, read hundreds of books a year. And speaking of her, are you *sure* she is making way more money now? Sure, in advances upon her royalties, but in total royalties? She's getting a much lower percentage of sales now.
I am really thinking of midlist books, of literary fiction and narrative non-fiction, and arguing that publishing has and will continue to lose readers who prefer ebooks, but find the prices to be too high, or ones who would take a gamble for $3 but not $16.
And in the end, no is no real risk. If, as I argue, people choose their format first, and then the title, selling more ebooks will not lower the number of print books sold. Given that there's no real cost to ebooks, there's no risk of losing money.
I have played around with lowering prices. It led to more sales, and more profit. Ebooks are about 10% of our total copies sold. And the two big advertised sales we participated in created two very strong backlist sellers for us. (That we don't do this more is simply due to my own bandwidth)
These days, most libraries purchase the ebooks, even when they're priced higher, mainly because of the multi-user license and ease of distribution. I had in mind individual readers who choose between ebook or print versions at online retailers or our own website. I may try a radical experiment for the holidays to see what happens (set ebook prices at about one-third the price for print companions). I'll let you know what happens. 😀
Thank you for posting about ebook pricing, Anne. I run a once-small, now larger independent scholarly press and have wondered whether our ebook pricing has been too low or too high for a while. Most scholarly presses price their ebooks close to the price of the print versions (probably too high, in other words). There's the fear that for academic books, at least, ebook sales will hurt print sales if the ebooks are priced considerably lower than their print companion (e.g., 50% lower or more). I wonder: do you think the situation is any different for academic books, which typically have a niche market already?
There's another comment about that here, and it's slightly different b/c of the "mandatory" audience (or whatever) of academic libraries. Would any of your current institutional buyers choose ebook over print if the ebook prices were much lower? If not, then it seems lowering ebook prices couldn't do any harm.
I would buy SO many academic ebooks if they were cheaper. As it is, I practically never buy academic books (because of the cost) which is, I think, also the case for many academics/researchers especially those with robust library access.
In this case the logic is that some people HAVE to buy the book (academic libraries) so why not price them as high as possible to earn back some of the money they lose on these books.
I’ve taken to borrowing e-books from my libraries and buy a physical copy of those that inspire me. I always assume digital books could be “disappeared” at any moment or become inaccessible if I maybe cross a country border or on some whim I can’t control because of DRM.
This sorta puts me out of the ebook pricing argument as most of my ebooks are $0.00 with the exception of the costs of living in a county that my libraries are in (ie, property taxes) I wonder how big my demo is...
Much lower ebook prices would be great for readers, bad for bookshops, and terrible for authors. *Maybe* there would be a knock-on effect to the print edition, but either way, that 75 cents/book royalty is pretty awful.
I hear you, but if, according to my perhaps faulty logic, very few people buy an ebook who would otherwise buy a print one, the royalties work out to pretty much the same either way (or you get a bit more in royalties)
That's perhaps so when there isn't much difference in cost, but might well change if there were a substantial difference. (I'm normally an optimist. I just know that money is tight for a lot of people.)
I have just never bought that logic, and the past decade hasn't borne it out either.
There are now basically two separate markets--ebook and print--without much overlaps, and traditional publishing is only competing in one of them, print. Current ebook prices from Big 5 companies are so high that many have stopped buying them, and are using the library or buying other books that are cheaper--because money is tight. I really believe it's hurting, not helping, mildest authors, especially those doing very high quality work.
I agree e-books are unjustifiably high, and it's such a loss for folks selling them. I say this as someone who used to run a magazine and set pricing for each of our formats (e-book pricing reflected the fact that we didn't have to print it - honestly felt like free money when we'd sell them).
When I see the cost of a (usually DRM-protected) e-book nearly as high as the physical book, I tend to either just request the e-book from the library instead or forego reading it entirely (I do feel bad admitting this, because it's not the author's fault). But I have never understood: why would I pay physical book price for something I can't even lend to a friend?
I tend to buy physical books and media. Every once in a while I'll look into an ebook version if I don't want to house the book after I read it. But the high price of ebooks sends me to the library, where I can read the physical book and return it afterwards. So, I've never bought an ebook, even though I'll search them out a few times a year.
This is certainly an interesting discussion. I’ve never really read e-books, I don’t like to read on a screen. I have taken to checking out audio books from the library, which is a medium I have come to love! I am able to “read” books so much faster, especially since I have discovered that you can change the speed. But my point in commenting, was to equate the expense of e-books with the expense of children’s books. Most picture books in the US have an initial print run in hardcover, and increasingly are $20. A year or two later, they might get released in paper back, and the price goes down to about half that. There are the smaller publishers that typically release the hardcover and the paperback simultaneously as my publisher, Reycraft, did with my debut picture book, A Walk Through the Redwoods. I really appreciated the paperback version. It is $10.95, as opposed to the $19.95 for the hardcover. And as such, I have had numerous friends who have purchased multiple copies of the paperback to give away to friends with children-- something they would not have been able to do, if it was only available in hardcover. Consequently, I was recently in London, in the children’s section of the bookstore, about 90% of the picture books were paperback-- including the new releases. Hardcovers were hard to come by. Paperback just makes so much more sense for a children’s book. The cheaper price point makes it more accessible to a wider audience. Not to mention as a former preschool teacher, the dust cover/jacket on a hardcover picture book often got in the way, was ripped or torn or even lost. And most hardcovers, don’t have the title etc. printed on the hardback, so you don’t know what the book actually is! Don’t get me wrong, there is a place for a hardcover picture book-- it is a work of art in its own right. And they certainly shouldn’t be done away with. But a paperback, is less costly to print, I assume, therefore the cheaper price, and is more economical for everyone. I would make this same argument for adult books too. Why do we need the hardcover in the first print run? They are more expensive, heavier, take up more room when you buy them, and I think make it harder to read on the go as you can’t fold the cover back and is difficult to hold in one hand, when for example standing on the subway. I understand publishing is a business, but the margins are already so small, so wouldn’t you want quantity to raise your income? Thus a cheaper price point would allow that quantity without any extra work being done, whether that is an ebook or a paperback.
Hardcovers are going to become a smaller and smaller part of publishing, I argue, mainly because of printing issues (in the US at least). The margins on hardcovers are significantly better than on paperbacks, which is why they continue, but fewer people buy them. I agree with you that paperbacks originals make more sense--and that's what Belt has always done, with a few exceptions.
This is a super smart commentary, and I wish the fear-based pricing model based on perceived human behavior (folk logic) would change with our data-backed times. I started my career in publishing, and so many decisions were made based on the fear that audiences would change their behaviors to something Not Books, when in fact audiences act in many different unpredictable ways. Some prefer newer tech and others prefer print. Some prefer to shop on Amazon, but others prefer to avoid it. The industry can accomodate both. I don't think bookstores would see much of a hit at all at this point if ebook prices were cheaper, but authors would definitely receive more royalties, and considering writers make a pittance compared to other industries but buy more books once they have the money, that's a rising tide that lifts all the boats.
IMO we've plateaued as far as digital behavior goes: there are some people who prefer ebooks and others who prefer physical books. I don't read on a kindle because I get such pleasure holding physical books, and reading on a device just doesn't do it for me. But if authors can make more royalties by selling more copies of cheaper ebooks, then that would be amazing.
thanks, Deborah! You put this all so well.
It seems like you have a perfect venue for conducting this experiment, lowering the price of certain titles while keeping others constant (or even raising a few), just to see. I await the results! :-)
While Bookbub et al. do a big marketing push and have a self-selected group of customers primed to buy, those one-time events can't be compared to long term price reductions of eBooks.
In economic terms, you are suggesting that books are a highly elastic product--lowering prices by 50% will increase demand more than 100% (so that total dollars go up--the ultimate goal--rather than down). The evidence is that other than big bestsellers, books are more like luxury goods, with inelastic demand where changing prices don't significantly affect sales.
That means most sales are to people who already wanted the book or had heard of it. The exact price isn't so important.
Your argument is that if eBooks were cheaper, you'd sell more eBooks. Certainly true but, I think, probably not true enough because the market for eBooks is not infinite. If one publisher lowers prices to (say) $4.99 across the board and sees a big increase in unit sales (though I doubt total profit), cannibalizing sales from other publishers, it might force all prices down. Dropping the average price of an eBook by 50% isn't likely to double sales because most people have about as many books as they can handle, especially after the initial "Sale!" rush is over. Lowering the price of books isn't likely to significantly expand the pool of regular book buyers. There are already libraries where books are free and used books that are much less than cover price - the book market already serves people with real sensitivity to price.
If lower prices automatically significantly increased sales, the used bookstores of America would be empty, but instead they are all full and most have another store's worth of inventory in an off-site location.
If one believes the "wisdom of crowds", then the fact that most publishers follow the same pricing model isn't necessarily collusion, it could be because that model is the most profitable overall. I suspect that someone at every publishing house has had ideas about lowering prices and has tried it or some other experiment and they found it doesn't work. Everyone in publishing is aware of (relatively) big sales of $1.99 eBooks for certain authors and if they thought it could be replicated, they'd have $1.99 divisions. Instead, when someone succeeds at that (e.g., Colleen Hoover; Andy Weir) mainstream publishers move them into the commercial publishing world, not the other way around. Colleen Hoover is making WAAAAY more money as part of mainstream publishing than she ever did as a self-published author precisely because her books are much more expensive, not because they got cheaper.
I get what you are saying, but I am arguing that there isn't one book market but several different ones. Used bookstores only sell print books, so they aren't part of my argument about ebooks.
I also don't agree with this: "Dropping the average price of an eBook by 50% isn't likely to double sales because most people have about as many books as they can handle" because ebook readers tend also to be voracious readers. Especially in genre! Readers of Colleen Hoover, say, read hundreds of books a year. And speaking of her, are you *sure* she is making way more money now? Sure, in advances upon her royalties, but in total royalties? She's getting a much lower percentage of sales now.
I am really thinking of midlist books, of literary fiction and narrative non-fiction, and arguing that publishing has and will continue to lose readers who prefer ebooks, but find the prices to be too high, or ones who would take a gamble for $3 but not $16.
And in the end, no is no real risk. If, as I argue, people choose their format first, and then the title, selling more ebooks will not lower the number of print books sold. Given that there's no real cost to ebooks, there's no risk of losing money.
I have played around with lowering prices. It led to more sales, and more profit. Ebooks are about 10% of our total copies sold. And the two big advertised sales we participated in created two very strong backlist sellers for us. (That we don't do this more is simply due to my own bandwidth)
These days, most libraries purchase the ebooks, even when they're priced higher, mainly because of the multi-user license and ease of distribution. I had in mind individual readers who choose between ebook or print versions at online retailers or our own website. I may try a radical experiment for the holidays to see what happens (set ebook prices at about one-third the price for print companions). I'll let you know what happens. 😀
Yes! Do! I beauty of ebook prices is that they are so easy to change.
Thank you for posting about ebook pricing, Anne. I run a once-small, now larger independent scholarly press and have wondered whether our ebook pricing has been too low or too high for a while. Most scholarly presses price their ebooks close to the price of the print versions (probably too high, in other words). There's the fear that for academic books, at least, ebook sales will hurt print sales if the ebooks are priced considerably lower than their print companion (e.g., 50% lower or more). I wonder: do you think the situation is any different for academic books, which typically have a niche market already?
There's another comment about that here, and it's slightly different b/c of the "mandatory" audience (or whatever) of academic libraries. Would any of your current institutional buyers choose ebook over print if the ebook prices were much lower? If not, then it seems lowering ebook prices couldn't do any harm.
I would buy SO many academic ebooks if they were cheaper. As it is, I practically never buy academic books (because of the cost) which is, I think, also the case for many academics/researchers especially those with robust library access.
In this case the logic is that some people HAVE to buy the book (academic libraries) so why not price them as high as possible to earn back some of the money they lose on these books.
Compare the top 5 bestselling self-published ebooks and print books: there is NO OVERLAP.
https://hotsheetpub.com/2023/11/october-2023-bestseller-lists/
I’ve taken to borrowing e-books from my libraries and buy a physical copy of those that inspire me. I always assume digital books could be “disappeared” at any moment or become inaccessible if I maybe cross a country border or on some whim I can’t control because of DRM.
This sorta puts me out of the ebook pricing argument as most of my ebooks are $0.00 with the exception of the costs of living in a county that my libraries are in (ie, property taxes) I wonder how big my demo is...
Much lower ebook prices would be great for readers, bad for bookshops, and terrible for authors. *Maybe* there would be a knock-on effect to the print edition, but either way, that 75 cents/book royalty is pretty awful.
I hear you, but if, according to my perhaps faulty logic, very few people buy an ebook who would otherwise buy a print one, the royalties work out to pretty much the same either way (or you get a bit more in royalties)
That's perhaps so when there isn't much difference in cost, but might well change if there were a substantial difference. (I'm normally an optimist. I just know that money is tight for a lot of people.)
I have just never bought that logic, and the past decade hasn't borne it out either.
There are now basically two separate markets--ebook and print--without much overlaps, and traditional publishing is only competing in one of them, print. Current ebook prices from Big 5 companies are so high that many have stopped buying them, and are using the library or buying other books that are cheaper--because money is tight. I really believe it's hurting, not helping, mildest authors, especially those doing very high quality work.
I agree e-books are unjustifiably high, and it's such a loss for folks selling them. I say this as someone who used to run a magazine and set pricing for each of our formats (e-book pricing reflected the fact that we didn't have to print it - honestly felt like free money when we'd sell them).
When I see the cost of a (usually DRM-protected) e-book nearly as high as the physical book, I tend to either just request the e-book from the library instead or forego reading it entirely (I do feel bad admitting this, because it's not the author's fault). But I have never understood: why would I pay physical book price for something I can't even lend to a friend?
because logic is not based on the fact that you don't own it, but on the fear that people will buy fewer print books if ebooks were cheaper.