Dan Gillmor, who we’ve mentioned here a number of times, has an article in the UK paper The Guardian about high American e-book prices, and how they have helped him rediscover his local library and used bookstores.
When new ebooks were $10, I was buying them all the time. In almost all cases, book purchases are impulse buys – something you want to have, right now. I was buying new best-sellers at a rapid rate, and happy to do so. (The books I bought this way tended to be mysteries and thrillers – the kind of book purchases I treated like movie tickets, to be read or seen once and then put aside.) No more. I still buy some e-books, but only at lower prices.
Gillmor’s complaints about agency pricing are old hat to Americans, but it might be significant to note that this article is showing up in the UK where they don’t have that…yet. An Office of Fair Trading investigation into agency pricing, begun early this year, is still underway, and UK publishers won’t be implementing agency pricing until the investigation is over. Gillmor is giving British consumers a preview of what they can expect if the OFT decides agency pricing is OK after all. (The OFT recently allowed Amazon to purchase UK e-tailer The Book Depository. Who knows which way they’ll decide on agency pricing?)
