E-books are going up in price?

Essentially, yeah:  The short version is that the largest publishers have decided on a floor on prices, and they’re making it stick.  I see Ace’s point about how this just ends up hurting the publishers themselves – but one nice thing about Kindles is that a lot of the books that I buy and plan to buy generally are going to be: much older titles, which they’re moving for one or two bucks anyway; directly published, which will typically be two-buck specials; and/or something from Baen Books, which will cheerfully sell me five dollar e-books, written by authors that I actually want to read.  Which is to say, areas where the big publishers have little or no control over the price.

And that’s why Amazon.com makes ridiculous amounts of money; they really, really want to be the one who gets to take yours.

7 thoughts on “E-books are going up in price?”

  1. In my group, we swap books around like a LeMons racing team* swaps parts. If someone finds something good, it tends to make the circuit. If something isn’t very good, I take it to the local used book store and it goes for trade credit.
    WIth Kindle, I can’t do either one. Yes, I’ve downloaded a bunch of free content- including a lot of Golden Age stuff I normally would never have got my hands on- and it’s king-hell for impulse buys, but I can’t swap books around and if I don’t like something it’s just too bad.

    Eh. Like it for what it is, accept its limitations, and move on.

    *- no, not LeMans: the OTHER guys. Google “24 Hours of LeMons”.

  2. With the kindle though you get the self-published books by authors, some of whom are Big Names as well as the new guys (Nathan Lowell anyone?). Actually Nathan Lowell is an excellent example of someone whom I hope prospers by his embrace of the new media.

    His books are fun and are of the sort that none of the bigs want to touch. His podcasts are even better, but he makes money off of the books.

  3. *grumble* I still don’t understand why an ebook is ever MSRP’d higher than it’s physical equivalent.

    Ah, well. The market will beat it out of them, sooner or later.

  4. I’ve enjoyed most of the self-published e-books I’ve read. Perhaps my tastes aren’t refined, though. You may also want to look at Baen — they have bundles of e-books for $18 for five or six titles.

  5. If I ever get my butt in gear and ever finish my book (seeing if I can also find someone to help do a cover for me as well) I am selling my book for $5.99 a pop. Then some time after I finish my third (in a triology) book, sell all three in one volume for $9.99 a pop.

  6. @ DaveP

    Unless an eBook has DRM (and even if it does), there is no reason why you all can not stick a copy of an ebook on a pen/usb-drive and swap it around as well.

    Mite take a whole minute to do the job.

  7. And when Ed McKay’s starts giving trade credit for used ebooks on USB drives I might think about it.

    Missed that point good and hard, Bob.

Comments are closed.