nuts.jpgFictionwise sent me a promo for ‘The Lovely Bones’ and some other movie books. I had already read ‘The Lovely Bones’ and thought I might enjoy a re-read. But it’s hard to swallow a $14.44 price ($16.99 if you aren’t a club member) when the mass-market paperback retails on Amazon for $7.99! The non-club price is MORE THAN double! And it’s locked down by DRM of course, making it less usable than its print counterpart. I think what has gotten lost in the whole ‘authors vs readers’ dialogue coming out of the whole Macmillan mess is that BOTH sides have to play fair. If we could really trust them to actually lower the price over time to match the comparable print counterpart, maybe we wouldn’t feel so strongly about paying that premium when the book is hot.

10 COMMENTS

  1. But it was only published in 2002! You have to give them some time to make money on it before you expect them to lower the price, right?

    This whole argument that they’ll lower prices later is bunk, and everybody knows it even if they don’t admit it. They’ll lower prices on a handful of floundering titles and point to them as their great success stories.

    Am I skeptical? Very much so.

  2. I did notice, years ago, that they lowered the price of The Da Vinci Code eBook when the mass market paperback came out, so they’ve had this theory for a long time. I rather suspect that eBook prices have generally been ‘fire and forget.’ It would take someone with a job to actually handle updating and few publishers have extra resources hanging around.

    I know I’m being biased when I say that the best cure to high prices is to shop publishers who offer low prices. Think about this, though. If they dropped the price from $16.99 to 7.99, they’d have to attract more than twice as many customers to break even. Would they attract that many more? I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that they’ll respond more quickly to dollars than to complaints (although there’s no reason not to complain as well).

    The ‘dynamic pricing model,’ in my opinion, is more about managing customers as they play competitive games, not a serious promise to have actual employees scrub the various distribution outlets and make sure they aggressively lower prices.

    Rob Preece
    Publisher

  3. Fictionwise doesn’t appear particularly affordable because their prices are set by publishers, not by anybody with a grounding in retail reality. Their prices change only if and when the order comes down the pipe to do so, which is why some books there sell for roughly the same as their paper equivalents while others are listed at higher-than-hardcover prices fifteen years after the mass-market paperback came out.

  4. You didn’t mention that these high priced books come with 100% micropay rebates. The way they run it, you get all of the purchase price back as a sort of store credit to use on other books they sell. Sure, it’s kind of a closed loop, but as a long-time customer my average cost for ebooks is pretty low thanks to the micropay rebate thing. If you stay with them over time it really works in your favor.

    Also, it ain’t exactly hard to deDRM the books that come in secure mobipocket. Not saying I ever would, but I *am* saying it ain’t hard.

  5. Rob, nice to hear from a publisher, and especially one that is willing to converse with real customers.

    I would think if ebooks become important enough to publishers that it would be very easy to just have ‘lower ebook price to reasonable amount’ every time a new paper version comes out. It’s just a checklist and shouldn’t require an extra employee if they will just make it part of their business.

    Steps to release mass-market paperback:
    1) pick release date
    2) arrange printing
    … (etc, obviously I have no clue)
    14) lower ebook pricing
    15) release done

  6. Actually, if ebooks truly become mainstream/high volume, there most likely won’t be any paperback editions.
    The only releases will be low-volume hardcovers and the mass market ebook.
    Figure about ten-fifteen years down the road.

  7. We have to remember that today, with finance dominating US businesses, only small, independent publishers are concerned with publishing, and consider readers their customers, the ones they must first and foremost please.

    The big conglomerate content publishers, on the other hand, look on their shareholders (not individual shareholders outside billionaires, either: pension funds, hedge funds, and other institutional investors) as the people they want first and foremost to please.

    To please these investors (and fulfil their ‘fiduciary responsibility’) the big publishers have to show profits, and rising profits quarter to quarter and year to year.

    This puts these publishers in a bind. They absolutely must balance the sales of hardcovers, paperbacks, and ebooks in such a way as to maximize their profits, and alienate none of the retailers along the way.

    None of them know the right equation for this as yet. They are trying different ways. Experimenting, you could say. As the market matures, all this will shake out.

    Could take a few years. What was that Bette Davis line in ‘All About Eve’? ‘Fasten your seat belts, folks…’

    – asotir

  8. Mike, what you propose is exactly what one publishing house I know of (ahem) does. When the HC first comes out, the eBook is priced at a percentage off the HC. If a SC edition releases, the eBook price is changed at the same time to the percentage off the SC.

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