In an article on his blog industry guru Shatzkin summarizes Professor Michael Cader’s analysis of Thursday New York Times piece on ebook pricing. The analysis was published in Publishers Lunch (subscription only). Shatzkin’s post is worth reading since the Cader article is not readily available to the public. I’m going to quote one of the most interesting points Shatzkin makes:
The Times piece makes a big deal out of consumer expectations of the $9.99 price. Cader points out that recent data from the ebook retailer Kobo described at Digital Book World — which shows that at Kobo they sell as many books for more than $9.99 as they for $9.99 — and Amazon’s own data undercut that notion. Cader says surveys of Amazon data have shown that 30% of the SKUs are priced higher than $9.99.
I have been told directly by a responsible person at Amazon that 4% of the titles they sell are deep-discounted to $9.99 and those represent 25% of the total sales. Of the other 75% of the sales, many (most) are less than $9.99 without necessarily deep-discounting, according to Cader, 30% are more. I have personally bought many Kindle books for more than $9.99 and some for more than $14.99.
Personally, i’m more for Baen’s pricing. $15 for advance copies before it’s available in print, $5 once a print copy is available. Of course, i’ve only ever purchased 2 hardcovers (Robert Jordan, go figure) everything else was paperback.
It blows my mind that people would pay $15 or more for a kindle ebook.
Do they ever stop to imagine a future where they might want to use a great ebook Reader made by Sony or LG or Asus or any other company? Do they realize that they will not be able to read the books they “bought” for their Kindle?
What if Amazon goes out of business in a decade? It’s happened to bigger companies. Do they realize that all of their Kindle books could just go poof?
My guess is that people just click the “one-click” button to buy. They want instant gratification. It’s only in the future that might learn that the hundreds or thousands of dollars they spent on ebooks has a lot of strings attached.