If it had been something like eight bucks, I’d be happy to social-media my reaction to the upcoming book whose name I am carefully not mentioning now. It is, after all, the sort of book that scratches several of my genre itches. However, since Macmillan decided to ask a ridiculous price for the electronic version: they instead get a snarky post in its place that points out how lame Macmillan is being.
They should take a lesson from Baen. Baen wants that sale. So much so that they’re willing to match the price of the text to the format. And, go figure: Baen still manages to make a profit without getting hammered by the courts for price-fixing. Fancy that…
And unfortunately Baen had serious problems when e-books got really big because they were working from models that assumed that the real money would always be in dead tree sales and so didn’t prioritize being in the Kindle store anywhere near highly enough. I loved Baen CDs back in the day, but we’ll never see another because e-books aren’t a curiosity anymore.
As explained here, when they did get their books onto the Kindle store, they apparently had to raise their prices and stop selling old monthly bundles. I believe they also had to promise not to do any more of those CDs. They also got Joe Buckley to disable direct links to individual books at baencd.thefifthimperium.com (so you have to download a whole CD to get any book).
Jim Baen’s policy was to give away free digital copies of older books as advertisements, and it worked. (But then, he also encouraged his authors to produce one or two books every year.) Even Amazon was not ready for that.
(Err … my previous comment was meant to be a reply to Dave R, so “they” is Baen Books.)
It’s not just MacMillan. Orbit want US$12.92 for Jim Butcher’s The Aeronaut’s Windlass on Kindle, but the paperback is US$8.81 and the hardcover is US$11.82.
A report came out last year that ebook sales had dropped off. Turns out they only looked at the big New York publishers. Smaller publishers and indie authors who charge non-extortionate prices were seeing steady growth, and still are. The big houses are heading for a big fall.
I know I’ve refused to buy a number of books over outrageous pricing. There are no shortage of things competing for my limited entertainment budget, and being insulted will remove possibilities from the list. This includes authors who say they don’t want my business, publishers who say they don’t want my business, and extortionate prices on e-books. (I know darned well that e-books don’t have nearly the costs associated with even paperbacks. Not cannibalizing your sales, I get. But charging above hardback prices for digital content?)
The funny part in all of this? Baen’s figured out how to get me to pay almost hardback price for an e-book: sell it to me three months early as an Advance Reader Copy. I’m happy to pay the premium to get the book early.
I will rarely pay more than five or six bucks for digital content, because I know that there are plenty of good books that can be had for three or four. The exceptions I’m willing to make involve: a book that, based on the subject matter, I know I really want to read; that has a glowing review from someone I trust; and that still costs less as a digital book than a used hard/paperback of the same title. If one of those three isn’t there, I wait until it is.