WITH THE CAVEAT that this is an unscientific poll (seriously, Internet scientific poll police: I know I know I know…) here be the results.
What do you make of these results? Are perceptions of the value of e-books declining? Or is the (yes) unscientific nature of the two polls skewing the results?
And if you do buy that a year later people think e-books should cost less, what do you think is causing the shift in perception?
I think the shift is due to the vast quantities of ebooks being offered for .99.
Maybe it's because ebooks are becoming more common and an inflated price is not tempting enough after the novelty wears off? Quien sabes..
Wow-thanks for posting the results from the two surveys. I think that the success of indie authors selling popular books for $.99-2.99, coupled with the continued rise of e-readers, is contributing to this shift.
I don't think it's the perceived value of the eBook declining, rather the market has grown and our expectations for a digital copy vs paper have been set.
There's no printing costs to pay, lending is tougher, you can't resell it, and it will not sit forever as a dogeared, highlighted, loved copy on your bookshelf. I would take a gander that more than 90% of ebooks are read and archived, never to be read again. It should cost less.
Alan and BP, I think you both hit it. Authors making their books available at really low prices makes people expect to pay less. And the idea of an e-book isn't quite so shiny and new anymore.
I agree that it is the shear number of cheap and good ebooks out there. Why pay more for less? Also ebooks remain something that you cannot physically hold. You can hold the ebook reader, but not the book. So maybe it's not worth as much because it doesn't seem like it is as much.
I've been really disappointed with the formatting of most e-books and really can't see the point of paying more than the 9.99 range – for good content. Beyond that, it simply is not the same as a physical book and I'm going to keep saying that till kingdom come. E-books are not mp3s, they never will be. I predict (desperately hope) people will go back to buying good old-fashioned physical books. Some things are suited for e-book format, like the shorter information packets bloggers and experts offer, but for fiction? Come ON people.
A shift in perception may be the hardest thing to map with anything approaching perfect accuracy. That said, if I had to take a guess, I'd say somewhere, something didn't live up to the hype. People are sheep, but they're smart sheep.
Hardcovers are priced to be on sale all the time. If the hardcover is priced $25, its wholesale price is $12, and you can probably buy it for $14-18.
$14 hardcovers were unusual two years ago. The perceived value of ALL books is eroding.
Several factors. The obvious:
1. Cheaper alternatives (self-pubs)
2. Increased awareness of the drawbacks of ebooks (as noted by Jennifer, above)
Less obvious:
3. The folks who were willing to pay $350 for an ebook reader were probably less inclined to watching their pennies to begin with. Now that the price has come down, more people own ebook readers, but it may be a population of readers who are more resistant to higher prices in general.
Walmart mentality: the narcissistic and ultimately self-defeating belief that everything should be free for me to buy but I should be paid a lot to make stuff for other people to buy. Calling people smart sheep is an insult to sheep.
Yes, the attitude is changing, because more people can access e-books and have first-hand experience. For example… In February, I didn't have a Kindle. I still don't, but now I have a simulator for my PC.
That's why I can now reply: Would you pay $14 for a paperback e-book? No, of course not. So why would you pay a higher price for a hardback e-book when it's identical?
Just curious, I wonder how many people voted each time? I'd guess more the second time around, and I'd echo what a previous replier stated. eBook readers are much more mainstream/general public than they were even a year ago due to price drops.
You don't have to have $$$ to burn to own one now, so I'd imagine the folks buying the books generally expect the content to be less expensive.
I've often wondered if there is a kind of mental correlation between music and books. When electronic songs cost .99 and an album $7.99-$9.99 , I think an electronic book is going to be a hard sell at anything over $10.
Personally, I'd love to see all eBooks fall to between $2.99 and $9.99 with only enhanced books going above that.
The shift is due to the offer by new authors of their e-books at 99 cents or free. It has conditioned readers to look for cheap books and undercut the value of any author's work.
I warned against this trend last year, but people argued with me that it is a free-market. True, but when such cutthroat pricing devalues the market it hurts everyone in the long run.
As a general rule, I agree with the latest poll. I really don't like spending more than $10 on an ebook. Sometimes I will, but that is determined by how much the print book is selling for. If Amazon has the print book marked way down, I expect the ebook price to be $10 or less.
In some cases, the ebook and the print book are within a few dollars of each other — or the ebook even costs more. Which do I buy? NEITHER. That pisses me off royally, and I pass on the book.
These are all very good points! After looking at my own personal purchasing behavior on this topic, I would agree that it is the perception of a digital commodity. It isn't tangible. It is an entirely different format of purchasing the same product.
For instance… most of us enjoy a great cup of Starbucks, but for the everyday, we usually save the extra cash and buy a coffee maker for home.
Colleges are moving forward with digital textbooks, the iPads and Leapads are changing the way our children and grandchildren are reading… But at least they are reading! Understanding that we are able to sell more volume on a digital property for less as opposed to the higher priced tangible book, which should cost more because of the expense, should be a given. It is how we behave as consumers.
Nathan great post! Thank you for sharing – anxious to see what the results will be in another year. Would also be very interested in people's thoughts on the costs of unabridged audible books.
I only buy paperbacks, which puts a limit of around $8 for what I am willing to pay for a book. An eBook would have to be considerably lower than that to entice me. I would fall in the $4.99 and lower range.
Assuming the science isn't flawed, I imagine this must have something to do with the inundation of so many $0.99 and $2.99 e-books into the market.
I suspect 90% of books are read and archived, never to be read again. Otherwise, if you're spending all that time re-reading your entire personal library of books, when would you ever have the time to read anything new?
That said, we have a sentimental attachment to physical books that we don't to ebooks. The latter, by definition, are not things people can cherish. We can repeat misleading arguments (e.g., representing the lack of printing cost as the lack of total costs, as if writers, editors et al. don't need to be paid for their work) as much as we want. In the final analysis though, we don't have the emotional bond to a file on our computer or inside our ereader that we do to an actual physical object. Without that emotional bond, we're not motivated to pay as much money as we otherwise might.
It's too bad, actually. At the rate we're going, there may not be in the room in the budget to create ebooks with decent layout and typography. We have our really cheap ebooks, but they suck to read. Pardon me if I'm less than thrilled.
To be fair, the more expensive ebooks can also have layout and typography problems. There, I'm wondering if there is a "gold rush" mentality. i.e., the books are old enough that the manuscripts don't exist or no longer exist in a convenient digital form. That makes the conversion to ebook tedious and time consuming to do well, but they wanted the product Right Now. Of course, some of it is also just inexperience. Would it have been fair to render final judgement on the web based on a sampling of the web pages created in the late '90s?
I have an e-reader and it takes a lot for me buy a book that costs more than $10.00 mostly for the fact that a lot of times the paperback version is almost always cheaper than the e-book version. If I find a book that I like, I look at the paperback price and if it's cheaper for the paperback, I log onto my library account and place the book on hold, or I go down to the local bookstore and purchase the book. One of the downfalls of an e-book is that with a lot of the books you can't share it with anyone else. I can easily buy the paperback for less and then have the opportunity to pass it along to someone who I know will enjoy the book as well.
I guess I'm one of the few people who does re-read hard-copy books. At least, the ones I really like. I don't necessarily re-read the whole book, but I do read excerpts. I have a lot of books that naturally fall open to my favorite spots. And sometimes I will even read an entire book over again. I recently re-read The Rainbow and Women in Love in their entireties just to wallow again in DH Lawrence. I'm the person who will always want hard-copy books. Even I purchase ebooks for convenience in transportation, I will probably buy the card-copy version at home. To keep at home. I guess I'm old-fashioned.
I think the results are accurate. It's how I shop for e-books, and now most of the people I know shop for them.
I don't think this means there's a shift in perception either. I think it means more people are reading, more are getting into e-books, and more want them to be affordable. When you're sitting there late at night and you have the ability to order and spend money on almost any book you want without even leaving the house, you have to draw lines on how much you will and will not spend. I personally draw the line at 10.00 for an e-book…not matter how much I want it.
I think the shift has a lot to do with the fact that ebooks have exploded in the last year and a lot of people are realizing that paying $14 for an ebook is kind of ridiculous. I've never been willing to pay more than $6 for an ebook, and I'm much less likely to do so if there is a mass market of that book on the shelves. I still prefer hard copies; an ebook has to give me something more for my buck if the publisher wants me to spend $6 on an ebook when a more appealing version is a buck more in stores.
I'm still apprehensive about 99c ebooks, though…
I can't display an e-book in my library, nor can I sell or donate it when I'm finished with it. A digital file eliminates many material and labor costs for publishers. Digital files should cost less than paper books.
I think it's simply the idea that data is often free in the Information Age. We are accustomed to assigning a low dollar value to things available online, and if we pay anything substantial for downloadable data it's a $10/month subscription to content, not a one-time $15.00 for a single item.
Songs are 99 cents on iTunes, many shows, comics, and all news sources are free online. Early on with e-books there was a novelty to it and we weren't sure what to compare them to, but now I think the mindset is settling on "if I can't hold it and touch it, it should be free or really cheap".
The big publishers aren't getting it. E-publishers get it. Self-published authors get it. But the big publishers still want summer fridays off, books that take years to be released, and basically to keep things the same way they've always been.
When I see new releases and the digital versions are more expensive than the print versions, I marvel at the arrogance.
I answer your question with a question.
How indignant would you be if your local supermarket suddenly removed all its discounts & loss leaders?
There's your answer
That's inflation for ya! With more people totting Kindle's it has become more mainstream to buy ebooks, and because ebooks will never cost more than print, their price will raise with the cost of print. At least, that's my theory…
I agree with Shawn and Alan. There are more e-books at 99c saturating the market and it's what owners of e-readers have come to expect. They search for low priced books. Having said that, I reduced the price of my books on Kindle to $2.99 for the month of April. Sales have continued past that date even though I raised the price in May. Lowering the price does get an author more exposure.
Ann
Very interesting data, thanks Nathan!
As far as I'm concerned, it certainly confirms my own ebook reading habits: I don't buy over $10. Actually, to be honest, I did it once and bought Jennifer Egan's Goon Squad at around $11 only because I live in Italy and that was the fastest way to get it on my Kindle – and I needed it quickly because I wanted to post an analysis of that book on my blog. So I guess it was an investment for my blog!
Ebook should cost less because of low production and distribution expenses. Ebook prices reflect that perception which has now become pretty universal among readers.
Not to mention the fact that when you've invested in an e-reader, you want to get your investment back: you don't want to lay out as much as you used to when you acquired books on paper (whether hardcover or paperback).
Then there's the (exploding) teen-age market: they've gotten an e-reader from their parents as a gift, they want to fill it up with reading material but their budget is limited: hence the great success – and vast quantity – of ebooks in the 99c – $2.99 range.
Hence the success of YA lit and of writers like Amanda Hocking who have exploited this aspect with paranormal romance explicitly aimed at the YA market.
I hear a lot of people say that the ebook will displace paperbacks – maybe that's where we're heading. One thing for sure: hardcovers are nice objects to have and to keep, to show off and to share. All things ebooks are not.
I'm with Jennifer. I think that our expectations for a digital copy vs. paper have been set. Personally, I've always been a bit pissed at hardcover pricing, though. The profit margins are so much higher… I've often heard that mass market paperbacks cost $1.50 to produce, hardbacks $2.50. Yes, there's increased shipping costs and whatnot, but there's a really big jump. Which is why they generally reserve hardback for authors who have a big following, presumably who love them enough to pay the difference to get first crack at a new title. When you don't see any production costs like paper or ink or printing, or shipping or warehousing costs, I think the design fees, formatting costs and electronic storage/delivery costs are negligible. I figure they'll charge what people are willing to pay… I imagine they might go so far as to charge more for bigger sellers as a result. I haven't really researched, that's just a gut opinion.
Perhaps if the publisher would drop the price of a new release from $ 14 (or in some cases $ 16 !!??) to $ 9.99 after say, two months (giving the paper version hardcover time to make a few bucks), it wouldn't leave such a sour taste in people's mouths. I suspect they might actually make more money in the short and long term making a cheaper e-book version available a short time afterward. Especially if they make this model an industry standard. On the other hand, e-books are still climbing in popularity and maybe its time for a reboot/rethinking of the old paper formats.
More people have realized that they can get good, quality books for $2.99 or less. Why pay $9.99 when you can pay $.99 and still end up with just as good a good read?
I just very begrudgingly purchased "The Omnivore's Dilemma" for $12.99 even though the paperback was priced 8-something. Luckily I like the book very much, so it was worth that price, but if I didn't like it I'd feel ripped off.
I never used to buy a ton of books unless they were sure-keepers from authors I already liked. I don't have a ton of shelf space in my home so I have to be selective. Going to the library was as in/convenient as going to the book store to find new authors (unless you count the library's pitiful selection).
Now that I have my Kindle, the convenience makes me want to read much more, and more impulsively, but I find that I agonize over any purchases higher than $5.99. Even with the sample, I don't like risking paying $10 or more on a book I can't even give away if I don't like.
I'm still dying for some kind of subscription model, where I can pay a fixed monthly fee and read whatever I want. I'd probably end up paying more than I do now, and be free of the risk of buyer's remorse!
In my perception, $5-$10 makes the most sense as a price point that's a compromise between marketability and fairness. I find the trend of $.99 books quite disturbing. It's not just about production costs. I am an author. I have spent months (or years, in some cases) writing and editing. Yes, I do expect to get paid for MY work. It's not just formatters and proofreaders that need to get paid. An extremely cheap book is undercutting the author's effort and work. If I self-publish and get 85 cents from each reader for writing 111,000 words, that's mind-blowingly unfair. I don't care if you're talking traditional publishing OR e-publishing. E-publishing as a lot going for it in that it can be more flexible than trad publishing BECAUSE of lower production costs. That said, bargain basement prices should not be part of it.
Well nowadays e-books are way more common now than when they were first a novelty. It's like that for any new product. When it first comes out, it's pretty expensive; but as time goes by the price slowly drops and price expectations change.
~TRA
https://xtheredangelx.blogspot.com
To expand on my point, and I think related to the pricing, is that there's still a dubious psychological sense of 'ownership' with digital media, and that puts downward pressure on pricing, too.
I also think –E's "less obvious" point is an interesting one!
I have to agree with a lot of the posts here. Personally, I won't pay more than $10 for an eBook. If the book is more than that, I will just purchase the paper version. Certain authors/books I prefer the paper version anyway because I already have other books in a series that are paper/hardback on my shelves. Books/authors that I consider "keepers" I will still purchase in the traditional way.
That said, I LOVE my ereader. I am a book reviewer and I love having such quick, easy access to books without having to worry about figuring out what to do with hundreds of books after I'm done reading them (supposing I don't want to keep them).
I completely agree with everything Vivien Weaver said though. Being a (yet unpublished) writer myself, I pay attention to the market and cringe at the idea of how much less authors are getting paid these days. Non-writers don't seem to understand how long it takes to write these books and how much effort is put into them. Some of these books take a year or longer to write/edit, etc. That's a lot of work on the part of the author to only get paid pennies.
And as Scott mentioned – sure, maybe they are comparable to things like songs on i-tunes, etc, in some aspects. They are most definitely just as easily pirated, that's for sure (a HUGE downside for authors). However, unlike most songs/tv shows/movies that still make revenue based on radio air-play/reruns on tv/dvd's purchased in store and on PPV, etc., books do NOT get those residual revenues. Just something to think about.
I'm a new author and I decided after a little research that I will not lower the price of my novel. At $4.99 it is selling quite well. I don't really understand how someone could produce a full-length novel then sell it for under a dollar, and I do think its counterproductive.
I like the idea of ebook for under $10. If I really love a book, I'll often buy it in print as well.
I believe the e-reader version should be less expensive as there are no printing costs involved– usually it is just an electronic transfer. I understand books (paperback and hard cover) being more expensive, as the materials to create them have a cost. What is the cost of an electronic transfer?
I am not saying the work the author/editor/agent has put into it has a low price, but I personally have a difficult time paying paying the same amount (or sometimes more) for an electronic version as a hard copy.
The obvious problem with this poll is that there are a lot of people who might think $9.99 is a fair price for a new (paper $25) ebook, and their answers get lumped in with people who wouldn't pay more than $5 or $6.
So interesting.
I think someone said this above, but I believe most people don't buy hardcovers, they buy paperbacks. So, the price of a book is fairly entrenched in the minds of most people as between 5-10 dollars, and they will pay that for a book in any form.
I also agree with what –E said. The folks who bought e-readers at 350 may also be the folks who tend to buy hardcovers and spend more. While the folks who buy a Kindle for 100 bucks, expect to match the paperback price.
Lastly, last years figures may have been skewed alittle by wishful thinking by some taking the poll – that hardcover prices would continue. I might be wrong on this, but it's a guess.
Thanks for doing this, Nathan – really interesting. I'll be interested in next year's results, too. 🙂
Basic economics, I think.
Supply goes up, price goes down.
I think it's the bottom line. By now, enough people have got to know the cost difference between printing a hardcover book and uploading an electronic file. While both accrue editing, typesetting, and cover art costs, the price of publishing an e-book stops there. One reason people buy e-readers is because the books are cheaper to buy. To many, a high-priced e-book reflects a money-hungry publisher.
In February of 2010, a much larger proportion of people were, or intended to be, traditionally published. The traditional publishers tend to price ebooks high. And their authors don't necessarily disagree, because with the royalty rates they have committed themselves to, if they want to make more than a few pennies per book, the price would have to remain high.
There are many more self-published authors now. They are pocketing a much higher percent of the book's price, and they have the flexibility to price their books competitively.
I think everyone is right that has commented. It is a combination of several factors. My guess is the largest contribution to the lower price for eBooks is the price of the readers have gone down and the increase in low cost eBooks.
I feel that the success of a few eBook authors have influenced this perception more than anything else. If Amanda Hocking can become a self made millionaire one 99c eBook at a time, then everyone can. And there is no economical reason for an author/publisher to make more and no reason for the consumer to be expected to pay more.
To address what Vivian and Char said, there appears to be readers who avoid 99-cent novels, and certain genres seem to tolerate higher price points rather well. I believe it was fantasy author Michael Sullivan who found that lowering his book prices to $2.99 lowered his sales. His audience and target audience is comfortable with $5-7 for his ebooks.
I've seen readers comment in forums that the 99-cent price turns them off by making them think that's all the book is worth. At the same time, there are people who won't even consider an ebook that costs more than 99 cents. Can't please everyone.
I'm really comfortable with $4.99 — provided the book is good (well-written, edited, professional cover, whether it's a traditional or self-published ebook). I'm aware that's a nice few bucks per copy in the pocket of an independent author or a small press author, but not really a good cut for a traditionally published author. I'm not sure how to reconcile that.
Speaking in my official capacity as a card-carrying officer of the Internet Scientific Poll Police (ISPP), let me assure you all this change was caused entirely by the lunar eclipse.
To be accurate, however, many of Amanda Hocking's books were not 99-cent books. She usually priced the first book in a series at 99-cents (and her shorter works, if I recall correctly), and the rest were $2.99. So,no, she didn't get to be a million making 35-cents a copy. A LOT of those sales were $2.99 ebooks with (about) $2.09 going to her. That's more than most writers make on a paperback.