Wired has a feature called “The Price is Wrong” looking at 13 ridiculously-overpriced apps for the iPhone. Some of these are really egregious, but the one that caught my eye was for an iPhone encapsulated e-book called The Sushi Experience. The price? A jaw-dropping $70. That seems more than a little fishy to me.
When I loaded up the appbook’s listing on iTunes, the first two words to catch my eye from the app’s blurb were “Random House”. At which point I said, “Ahh,” and was no longer surprised. Random House has always led the pack on ridiculous e-book pricing.
That said, the same book on Fictionwise is $40 less $12 store-credit rebate, so “only” $28 (or $23.80 if you subscribe to FW’s discount program). And it is $32 on the Kindle (and hence one of those rare e-books that Amazon actually does not have cheaper than everybody else). That is still a ridiculous rate for an e-book, however. Random House really needs to get its act together.
Good catch, Paul. … But the app could be worth the extra money: when you touch the wok image on your iPhone, fresh Sushi flows onto your plate. (Chopsticks not included.)
This is a great example of whacked pricing:
( **The Sushi Experience** )
$ 70 …. Ebook on iTunes store
$ 32 …. Ebook for Kindle at Amazon
$ 28 or $ 23.80 …. Ebook at Fictionwise
$ 40 …. Hardcover list price
$ 29.20 .. Hardcover at Amazon, new (ships free)
$ 2.38 …. Hardcover, new, via Amazon sellers (+ 3.99 shipping)
$ 0.99 …. Used hardcover via Amazon sellers (+ 3.99 shipping)
Yet another example of why consumers need a comprehensive search engine for books and ebooks, to compare prices from many sources, large and small.
Michael Pastore
50 Benefits of Ebooks
It’s Chris Meadows, not Paul, I should have thanked for finding this piece.
I just glanced through the book with the “look inside” feature at Amazon. It’s chock full of pictures within the text, and there’s lots of text formatting for the recipes.
That means it was a pain in the rear to format for an ebook which increases the price of production a considerable amount.
You can’t expect a book like this to cost the same as a novel.
@Marilynn. Looking at the sample of the Kindle version they didn’t do anything special in formatting it. It’s quite basic.
They’re basing the ebook list price on the print list price, just like almost every other ebook out there.
That said these types of books are generally only going to be formatted properly as PDF’s, or possibly with some work ePub, and aren’t really suited to the portable devices available to most readers.
~B
I know of at least one large publisher that is pricing their books high on purpose to discourage purchase, for various political reasons e.g. not offending print wholesalers, to not cannibalise print sales etc. The e version mainly exists for marketing reasons. I expect the landscape 12 months from now to be quite different.
“I know of at least one large publisher that is pricing their books high on purpose to discourage purchase, for various political reasons e.g. not offending print wholesalers, to not cannibalise print sales etc. The e version mainly exists for marketing reasons. I expect the landscape 12 months from now to be quite different.”
Sounds like Macmillan.
What?!? You forgot the price for the torrent format 😉 Seriously though, the greed is amazing (as is the “justification” for said greed).