This is How I Feel About....eBook Prices

This is How I Feel About eBook Prices

This is something that has been bugging me lately.

Now, I love my kindle.  


I lovveeee to read and love having a kindle, but eBook prices are ridiculous.

Let's think this through.

Costs to make a physical book:
-paper
-binding
-ink
-printer
-distributing to stores
-author & publisher costs

Costs to make an ebook:
-author & publisher costs

No paper. No ink. Just words in cyber land. Please tell me why then, are ebooks hardly any cheaper than a physical book??? I understand that all books costs something to publish. You have to pay the author and the publisher for their time/advertising/etc. But to physically distribute and make eBooks costs next to nothing. Why then, do they cost almost the exact same as physical books!!

Look:
I read this whole series recently. But, the cost for the kindle book was MORE than a hardback. How is that even possible!!??


I sniff price collusion. You sly little publishers...I'm onto you. NOT COOL.

10 comments

  1. I'm so with you on this! I love my kindle but seriously, the prices put me off even using it! Unless its to make notes or doodles, which is such a waste of money, I really thought the price of ebooks would reflect the actual cost of what is in a sense a large email!

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  2. I feel the same way. I see the convenience, but I don't understand why the prices are the same...totally ridiculous.

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  3. I don't have an ereader, so I can't add to this (although that is some nifty chicanery they're pulling there)...but I am curious how you numbered your comments :)

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  4. oooooh, honey, there are way more than author and publishing costs. Trust me, as a writer I've done ALL the homework. Did you know you have to have an agent just to potentially get a book published? Yep! You can't submit a manuscript to a publisher. They will trash it. You have to submit to an agent, hope they will accept it, and let them submit it to publishers for you. Only about .2% of books actually get published. And as far as ebooks go, when the costs are all said done, and everyone gets their share, authors only receive about .96 cents per ebook sold. I follow agent and author blogs like crazy. They break it all down. Nathan Bransford just did a blog post about this.

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  5. Here is Nathan Bransford's post, breaking it all down. If you really want to know why ebooks cost equal or more than the hardcover, check it out.
    http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2011/03/why-some-e-books-cost-more-than.html

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  6. I know that there are a lot of other factors in costs and etc., but at the bottom line it still does cost less. and I'm not just making this all up either, i've read about it in the wall street journal how publishers were being investigated for price collusion.

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  7. I hear you, however one of the reasons I love the Kindle is the fact that you can get so many books under $5 that you would even be able to find anywhere else. I am not so much a best seller reader. I am a history buff and I was able to get the entire Ulysses S. Grant Memoirs for .99 vs. $50 in the book store with all the pictures included.

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  8. Another good reason not to own a Kindle

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  9. What I don't like is that they can remotely delete stuff from your eBook, that you've paid for! In the link below, they refunded customers, but the fact that they can do this seems wrong to me..

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html <-- very interesting, and kind of ironic given the book they deleted!

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