What’s the Right Price for Ebooks?
Author Chuck Windig, GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram, and TechDirt’s Mike Masnick all took on the question of ebook pricing recently, arguing that production costs (you know, minor details like advances, editors, etc.) don’t or shouldn’t factor into the end price.
Ingram writes that “It doesn’t matter what e-books cost to make,” and Masnick follows with “Nobody Cares About the Fixed Costs Of Your Book.”
But nobody cares about the fixed cost of your car, either. And yet, it matters, in theory as well as in practice.
Ingram:
But as author Chuck Wendig notes, what e-books cost to manufacture or distribute is irrelevant to everyone but the publishers themselves. All that matters is what book consumers are willing to pay for an e-book — and the same principle applies for any form of digital content.
In fact, an ebook’s production cost is directly related to the decision to make it at all. Just as buyers may decide that a $12.99 ebook is too dear, sellers may decide that any price below that level doesn’t justify the cost of writing, editing, and publishing it.
If demand were all that mattered—reader heaven—ebooks would cost 99 cents and you could impulse-buy them like an iTunes song. In book-business heaven, ebooks could charge some big number, and readers would have no choice but to pay up.
In reality, as in theory, the market for books is only so big—we only have so much time—so a 99-cent price point might move a lot of units but not enough to justify the cost of production. Obviously, a $50 price point would crush sales and also bring in much less revenue overall.
With either, the ultimate outcome would be a hollowing out of the books economy. With far less prospect for making back their upfront costs, publishers would only bankroll sure winners, and even those would make less money than before. Writers would have less incentive and less ability to write books. Authors who are capable of producing quality books would do something else.
The fixed-costs-don’t-matter argument hinges on your conception of the nature of the product.
Wendig likens a book to fast food:
An e-book is a digital good. Ephemeral and intangible. Sometimes we don’t even have access to the e-book itself in the form of a file — in the case of Amazon, we’re just “renting” the e-book the same way you rent Taco Bell food. You bought it. It’s inside your device. But if Amazon decides you don’t need it anymore, one snap of the wizard’s fingers and the e-books are poof, gone, siphoned from your reader like gas from a gas-tank. E-books have no supply — if I buy one, it doesn’t reduce how many remain, because theoretically infinite copies remain. No cost to reprint. No cost to remake. It just… sits out there, attempting to be the very embodiment of the Long Tail.
This is what the audience sees and believes.
It matters little what the e-book actually costs.
It only matters what the audience thinks they should cost.