I do know how much it costs to shelve 1500 books–and I consider it money well spent!

For a variety of opinions and some excellent information on electronic books and their world, visit the blog: http://www.teleread.org.

The Fictionwise site has been selling DRM-protected e-books for many years. On that site, ‘Wolf Hall’ currently sits at $20.00 for non-members, $17.00 for members. Fine. That’s a hot new title. ‘Infinite Jest’ lists at $17.99 for non-members, $15.29 for members — and it’s been out for over 15 years. Perhaps that’s a bad example, ’cause it’s huge. How about ‘High Fidelity’ by Nick Hornby, a much shorter text. It lists at $14.00 for non-members; $11.90 for members. That book came out in 1995. The customer must judge for him- or herself whether these prices are acceptable. They are about equal to what one would pay for the trade paperback; perhaps double the price for mass-market (if such editions of these titles ever existed). When one considers that the content is licensed material — meaning, first sale doctrine does not apply — e-book adopters may begin to seem a bit less petty in their disgruntlement, regardless how misplaced the one-star Amazon reviews might be.

And as regards the devices themselves: Yes, they are expensive up front. But have you priced enough shelving to hold 1500 books, lately?

To the point of e-books, I agree with you that something you can’t own in the same way as a physical book shouldn’t necessarily be priced in the same way as a physical book. But I’m guessing that the savings from not printing physical books probably amounts to a few dollars per book. (I would love to see something concrete on this.) The fact remains that the greatest cost in creating a book is creative effort–by the author, by the editor, sometimes even by the people in sales and marketing. If publishers are forced to work with even smaller margins, the books will suffer.

I think it comes down to expectations. Do you want your e-book to be available on the same day as the hardcover? And, if so, are you willing to pay a few bucks more? Or do you mind waiting a bit for a cheaper e-book? The primacy of hardbacks is a topic for another day, but I don’t see publishers abandoning them this year or next.

One blogger, on the Guardian I think, suggested that e-books could be a subscription service–that your subscription gives you browsing rights to a huge number of e-books, as many as you want, but only so long as your subscription is current. Given the impermanence of e-books I wonder if this isn’t the right solution. But I also share the concerns of the recent NYRB essay in which the author worries about the ultimate fragility of a library made of bytes and pixels.

Thanks for the comment!

I appreciate that you want the Publishing Industry to come through, I too want to see it suceed. However, being from Detroit, over the last year, I have heard many people in this country rail against the automotive industry as to how they mishandled their own business yada yada yada. We also see the overpaidexecutives in the banking industry who received ridiculous bonuses for helping to crash their own indsutry and with the world’s economy. Don’t we need to take a look at the publishing industry as well and ask, why should I have to pay more for books (especially an ebook that I don’t own, I can’t lend out and I can’t sell on e-bay or to a used book dealer to recoup my money after I’m done with it) just so publishers can keep their ritzy Manhattan offices, be reimbursed for their client lunches or whatever else they do. Don’t all industries, in this day and age, need to take a look at their bottom line and see how they can stop wasting money so they can put out a quality and affordable product, instead of just going a long with “politics as usual” and screwing over the consumers?

But I would like to see patience on all sides. It’s still early days and the long-term implications of pricing aren’t clear to anyone just yet. What I find kind of amusing is the customers who rail against the fat-cat publishers and their titanically wealthy authors. James Patterson aside, book publishing is a pretty threadbare industry compared to most, and there just isn’t as much money in it as many would like to believe.

I want books to be affordable, but most of all, I want books to be published. If book publishing tanks like the newspaper biz, we’ll all be poorer for it. Sure, small publishers can take up a lot of the literary slack, but they won’t be able to pay great nonfiction writers enough money to go write scrupulously researched works, either.

Thanks for weighing in!

It’s easy to see the logic of charging similar prices – it’s the content you pay for, not the package – and it’s true that the publisher should be able to set its own prices. And yet I can’t help but ask, why would I pay the same amount (or more) for an electronic edition? Doesn’t a good part of the cost of a printed book stem from its physical manufacture?

Just a couple random thoughts.