I have written before about how this has been a bad ebook year for me—the books seem less interesting, the quality seems lower, the prices higher and the selection worse. I’m reading what I have already, and finding myself driven back to the classics, the indie stuff and other options off the beaten publishing path. I ran some numbers today and found that, as I expected it would, my dissatisfaction is being reflected in my ebook spending. This has been, by far, my cheapest book year yet!
I have been keeping stats on my ebook spending since I bought my first-ever paid-for ebook back in 2009. I have been curious to see whether buying ebooks was cheaper than buying paper, so I log money spent and books read on a spreadsheet and then divide the number to get my total cost per book. I am at about $9 a read right now and expect that to drop significantly as I get through my backlog of purchased stuff. Here is now this spending breaks down by year:
2009- $1000 (averages to $83 per month). Chalk this up to newbie enthusiasm. Whee! Books! Some of this was also replacing paper copies of books I owned already, and that’s a sunk cost. They’ve all been replaced by this point, so I am no longer buying this sort of title.
2010- $1300 (averages to $108 per month). I was a bit nuts about the Fictionwise coupons, and then when agency pricing was announced, I panicked that prices would go up (they did!) and cleaned out my wish list, making this an all-time high spending year.
2011- $788 (averages to $65 per month). As I predicted, agency pricing raised book prices, so I bought less. With my once-favourite store no longer able to offer coupons, discounts or titles from major publishers, and with Kobo stepping into the gap with more expensive books, I became a lot choosier—and have stayed that way!
2012- $129 so far (averages to $25 per month). What can I say? It’s been an awful year. I’m tired of having to play copy editor with books I’ve bought and paid for. There are two series I devoutly follow, and beyond two books purchased at near-full price representing that, I’ve bought an Amazon gift card to cover the occasional deal of the day purchase, and some public domain compilations at $2-3 a pop from Delphi Classics. And that’s been pretty much it!
So, how is the rest of the year looking? Well, I still have $40 left on the Amazon gift card I purchased, so I am in good shape there. I anticipate maybe a few more $9.99-level purchases if a topic comes along that greatly interests me (I have a few Sherlock Holmes pastiche collections on my wish list, ready to go when I finish some other stuff). And one more Nora Roberts J.D. Robb series novel. But it would surprise me very much if I ended the year above $200 total. That’s an 85% drop from my all-time highest year!
My spending proves it—my ‘worst year ever!’ feeling was not just in my imagination. Rising prices, falling quality and questionable selection has made a huge dent in my ebook spending. I still have plenty to read—it’s just not new stuff. The publishers are no longer attracting me to what they are selling today. Can they win me back? Maybe. Get some titles that aren’t derivative vampire pap, price them reasonably, promote them through the channels I check regularly, and proof-read them before you slap them on the store, and you might get me back. Time will tell!
All Zumaya titles are always $6.99 at Kindle, so you can actually get some decent reading for under ten bucks. Nor are we alone. Most of the established independent ebook publishers sell for $7 or less, and they aren’t all publishing erotica. 🙂
All our Kindle titles are also designated lendable, so if you’re a Prime member you can sample a couple for free.
What I’m suggesting is that there is a fairly large category of ebooks you won’t learn about on Amazon because the publishers can’t afford to pay for preferential placement. And since Amazon considers itself the publisher of the self-published, they show a natural favoritism for those. Which is only to be expected.
The down side for readers, though, is that there may be something available they would love, only they’ll never know about it.
Joanna, while I have not kept track of my spending on e-books, I can pretty much tell that this is also a slow year for me with my Christmas Amazon gift cards lasting until Mother’s Day in May when I got a new supply. Also, I did the same as you in March of 2010, knowing that prices were going up when the agency model kicked in on the first of April, I bought everything on my wish list. Mostly since then I have waited for price drops. But as to this year, no, there are not as many good books and the quality of editing is abysmal. It is annoying to have words in books from major publishers constantly hyphenating in the middle of a line, and other anomalies.
Well, I’m a compulsive OneClicker of free books, sales, and indies. When I first became aware of them, I bought everything I saw. I am now MUCH choosier since I have over 7,000 ebooks in my Amazon account, something like 600 on my Kindle. I still spend around $100 each month but that also includes Mp3s. I’m behind in adding titles to my spreadsheet, but my average price is around $.45. Yes, 45 cents per book. I never spend more than $5 on any ebook and rarely that. I’ve also checked out a number of ebooks from the library, our main library has a pretty good collection.
There were a bunch of good history books available on Memorial Day and there are always good mysteries, thrillers and romances available. I find that most are fairly clean and that most with errors are from traditional publishers. It seems like they want to capitalize on cheap backlist titles so they scan them and post them without thorough proof-reading.
I actually spent above my average this week to get one of Scott Adams’ 20th anniversary books for my Kindle Fire. It was $7.99! So far, it’s great. He tells the story of how Dilbert came about, including pictures of comics he drew as a kid. Humorous as always.
Other good buys recently, Lone Survivor for $2.99 and Lady of the English for $3.99.
I find these books mostly through a bunch of book blogs like Books on the Knob, DailyCheapReads, and Randomize Me. I also get ereaderiq.com’s free book email daily.
I don’t keep a record of my spending, but my experience is just the opposite. I’m a very selective reader. Free or $.99 isn’t enough inducement for me to read a bad book. But I’ve been delighted with some of my finds. I don’t have much money to throw around, so my limit is usually $4.99. Even in that range, I’ve found some superb writing, some of it e-versions of previously published work and some of it by new indie writers. Maybe we’re not looking in the same places.
One of the best books I’ve read so far this year by an indie is Plaguewalker by Gemma Tarlach. It’s easily the equivalent, in sheer writing quality and historical authenticity, of As Meat Loves Salt. Another excellent read in that genre is Richard Herley’s The Tide Mill. Not every indie book I’ve read comes up to that standard, but many of them are worthy of a larger audience than they generally manage to attract. And they’re priced reasonably.
Yes, I agree, a lot depends on where you look and what your preferred genre is. I generally check the Kindle deal of the day, and I check the new releases page at Kobo (usually for ideas of books to wish list at the library). I also pretty thoroughly go over the new releases at the library. I can’t imagine I am missing any releases from big pub! For indie stuff, I rely on reviews at a few blogs I frequent. I am choosy about genre, so I don’t patronize Baen or Carina Press even though I appreciate their business models.
As for price, I think that I have proven for my past spending habits that I am not averse to spending money 🙂 My issue has been that I am finding more and more that the expensive big pub stuff is error-filled and not that well produced. So I am a lot more skittish about taking a chance on something I am not sure about.
Interesting, because just the other day I was asking my wife ” Is it me, or is it the quality of the books I am buying?”, as I have lost interest in almost all the books I have tried to read over the past year. The writing quality seems to have gone down, the stories have been told before (in fiction books), and the books have often not met the hype. I too have gone back to classics recently, so I am glad to see it is NOT just me. Hmmm, maybe thats’s why I have slopwed down my eboook buying?
I’ve been mostly satisfied with books I’ve purchased in 2012. The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus and HHhH by Laurent Binet were both top notch. Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan was good enough, not stellar. I’m enjoying 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson so far, half way through. There a few others I’m looking forward to later in the year. I’d say it’s a good year. So what are the bad books?
As for poor quality, I found a few typos in The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer (paranola for paranoia) but no reason to get excited. What are some of the books with falling quality?
Since giving up titles from the legacy publishers I have had a great year with titles from Smashwords and other indies, all under 4 or 5 dollars. Only a couple of duds and caught them very quickly.
I gave away my Kindle before Xmas and yesterday bought a new Touch, after reading on my iPhone.
Where are the bad books? It depends on what you read, Greg. I have not kept an exhaustive list because if it’s a library book, I’ll give up rather than continue, but I know that the new JD Robb (a best-selling series) had at least a dozen errors, as did the new Charlaine Harris, which is also a best-selling series. The bigger issue is that I’m not checking every big pub book because I am no longer buying them to check! I’ve felt so burned by the high prices and shoddy quality that I have just opted out altogether. So maybe you are finding error-free books in some genres I don’t read, I can’t vouch for every book. But I am avoiding the issue by reading classics and indie stuff.
Joanna, I find it interesting that books in best selling series have more errors than lesser known literary works. Those books sell more so I would have thought they’d put more effort into correcting them. But for some reason it doesn’t really surprise me.