How Much Are You Prepared To Pay For An E-Book?

Over the last two years or so, the popularity of e-books has grown enormously. A lot of the credit for that must go to the Amazon Kindle reader which, whilst not the first e-book reader to hit the market, has undeniably been a major influence in the growth of the market for both e-book readers and the e-books that accompany them.



E-book sales for 2011 are forecast to make up between 12 and 15% of total book sales. The market is still in an early stage, but e-books are becoming more and more important in the world of publishing. If anything, their importance may actually be a little higher than the straight percentage might suggest. At the risk of being trite, e-book reader owners are likely to be the type of people who read a lot of books. They are, in other words, the target demographic for the major publishing firms.



So, it would make sense for publishers to set the prices of e-books at the right level. Or else they run the risk of upsetting some of their best customers. So, what would a fair price for an e-book be?



E-books use no ink, paper or bindings. Neither do they need to be shipped by road or rail since they are not a physical product. Therefore, they should be quite a bit cheaper than traditional print books - right?



Well not really. The cost of paper, ink, bindings and transportation is, according to publishers, only a small part of bringing a book to market. There are editing costs, proof reading costs, marketing costs etc. All things considered, the lack of a few reams of paper is, according to a number of major publishers, neither here nor there.



Up to a point, you can see some logic in this argument. But it begs the question why, if these factors don't influence book prices, is there such a difference between paperback and hardback prices? It doesn't make a lot of sense.



Amazon had a policy of pricing e-books at $9.99 or less until recently. Until they had a disagreement with some of the major publishing houses that is. At one point one publisher’s books (briefly) disappeared from the Amazon website.



Many publishers have now adopted the agency pricing model. That means that the publishers dictate the selling price rather than the retailer. If you are searching Amazon’s Kindle store for something good to read on your Kindle 3, you may just find the notice "this price was set by the publisher", which is just Amazon letting you know that they didn’t fix the price for that particular book.



On the other side of the coin, there are those who suggest that Amazon’s $9.99 price policy wasn’t sustainable in the long term and that Amazon may just have been encouraging consumers to get used to e-books, and to help boost Kindle sales at the same time.



When you're finished with an e-book, you can't pass it on to friends or family (although Kindle owners can now lend Kindle books to other Kindle owners for a two week period). You can’t donate it to the charity shop or local library and you can’t sell it on to a second hand book store. You don't have as many options as you would have with a normal paper book. So, given that e-books have fewer options, the price should also be lower.



At the moment, an e-book costs whatever the publisher says it should. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you have to agree with them and pay the asking price.You could just wait for a couple of months and the price of the e-book may, as is often the case with video games, reduce significantly following the initial launch period.



You could even decide to spend your hard earned dollars on something entirely different - a DVD, a video game, tickets to a concert. Instead of reading a book, you might decide to watch TV or listen to the radio. At the end of the day, books are a discretionary purchase which need to compete with other products and services for both your time and your cash. As a matter of fact, an e-book, like other discretionary items, should cost no more than you are prepared to pay for it. Not a penny more, not a penny less.



Find out more about the Amazon Kindle 3 - and don't forget to have a look at the wide range of Kindle covers - they will help to personalize your Kindle as well as protecting it.