From an article in China Daily entitled “Online retailers go head-to-head”:
The country’s e-book industry has become the latest battlefield for the nation’s top online retail giants while most publishers and industry insiders are playing wait and see.
On Feb 20, 360buy Jingdong Mall, the nation’s No 2 e-commerce website by sales, announced it was launching an e-book retail platform, selling novels, magazines and multi-media books in digital form.
“We planned to sell e-books ever since the company decided to sell paper books years ago,” said Liu Qiangdong, chief executive officer of 360buy.
Liu’s company acquired the sales rights of the e-books from the book publishers, and 360buy will split the revenue with them. According to Shi Tao, vice-president of the company, 60 to 70 percent of the revenue will be taken by publishers.
However, most Chinese publishers have not decided whether to embrace the Internet, and those who did participate in online businesses are complaining about the e-commerce websites’ low-price marketing strategy.
“The average price of e-books in the United States is 5 percent to 30 percent lower than paper books, but the e-books selling in China are 75 percent lower than the paper copies,” Beijing News reported, citing Bai Bing, chief editor of Jieli Press, who publishes children’s and teenager’s books.
Most e-books selling on 360buy.com cost less than 10 yuan. Buyers can download the book on at most four different devices, including personal computers and smart phones operating the Android system.
Bai’s opinion was echoed by bigger publishers.
“The key issue for the publishers is that they have to control the pricing rights of e-books,” said Li Yongqiang, head of the China Renmin University Press Co Ltd.
Lots more in the article. Thanks to Michael von Glahn for the link.
Hah! China has got it right, where the U.S. has got it wrong. Ebooks _should_ be only 25% of the paperback price, when you compare the costs of production, shipping, storage, returns etc.
Why are we paying paperback price (and sometimes hardback price) for something we can’t read in sunlight, lend, resell or easily transfer, and for something we don’t actually OWN?
(Ebook purchase contracts state that when we press the “Buy” button, we are only renting the ebook.)
A lot of us aren’t buying. The early promise of ebooks was greater accessibility and lower price. But publishers, desperate to preserve the pricing structure of paper books, have been fighting a bitter rear guard battle to keep ebook prices high.
I used to buy a lot of paper books. When the first kindle came out I switched over and bought a lot of ebooks. I stopped when the big Publishers jacked up the pricing level.
And now I DON’T BUY EITHER. I don’t want mountains of paper books and I refuse to pay hugely inflated prices to lease an ebook that is no more than a tiny blit of digital data which I can’t lend, re-sell, move between devices or even be sure I can retain access to in the future.