Along with the announcement of the Apple iPad today came the announcement that Apple will be opening an E-book store (iBookstore) to go along with the iBook app. If the examples Steve Jobs showed today are a good representation of prices, then the ebooks on the Apple site will cost between $8 and $15 each. This is similar pricing to Ebooks.com and I think Amazon is selling most of their ebooks for around $10.
This all seems very pricey to me for a book with no paper. It is a simple file stored on a computer and transferred through purchase to another computer. Pricing an Ebook at around the same price as a softcover book seems a bit excessive considering there is no printing involved and the consumer does not receive a tangible object. A book, once purchased and read, can be traded with friends, sold to a used bookstore, or even exchanged through some type of book exchange. You can hardly do this with an Ebook.
Barnes & Noble has a no refund policy on Ebooks.
Amazon has a no refund policy on downloadable software content. It does not specify Ebooks, but I would assume they qualify under this stipulation
Ebooks.com says refunds are given at the discretion of their management. That’s encouraging…
I’ve never heard of a book store having a no refund policy on new print books. If you get the book home and realize you don’t like it, you can return if for a full refund. Some may charge a small restocking fee or have a limitation on how long you can keep the product (30 days, etc.).
Authors typically get royalties from the publisher for book purchases. The average range for royalties for a hardcover is 10-15% of the list price. Ebooks have a similar royalty percentage. Let’s say a hardcover sells for $20. The author makes $2-3 off the sale of each book. If the Ebook only sells for $10, the author would only make $1-1.50 off each sale. Is there a difference in the amount of work involved for the author if the consumer buys an Ebook or a hardcover? No. Is there a difference in the cost to the publisher of producing an Ebook or a hardcover? You betcha. The publisher is making a hefty profit off that Ebook and passing none of that on to the author.
The publisher might argue that buy selling an Ebook they are losing a potential book purchase, thereby losing some money. Somehow I doubt this. The people that love and buy books are still going to purchase books. The option of purchasing Ebooks is most likely adding new consumers who would not otherwise be purchasing books.
Let’s discuss pirating. It is very difficult and costly for anyone people to reproduce an actual printed and bound hardcover book. For the individual consumer, it would cost a lot more money to reproduce a book than to just buy that book. I would suspect there are not many “companies” out there reproducing and selling pirated print copies of books. An Ebook is very simple to copy and distribute to millions of people over the internet. There is little difference between an Ebook and an MP3 or a video file of a movie. Music and movies have been being distributed over the internet for years now. It is only since the release of Ebooks that authors and publishers have had to seriously consider the ramifications of piracy.
So what is the solution? Who knows! Some authors are now offering their Ebooks for free in the hopes that readers will enjoy the book and choose to buy it in print form. This is risky to say the least. I would really like to see Ebooks as a bonus with the purchase of a hardcover or softcover new release book. I would love the idea of having a “digital copy” of my books. Another option would be an Ebook rental site similar to Netflix that would allow you to pay a fee and read Ebooks while signed online, but that would not allow you to save the files to your computer or Ereader. This site would have to somehow disable the Select All - Copy functions of the browser.
It is possible that Apple will come up with some way to disable the ability of pirating their Ebooks being sold from the iBookstore, and if they can that is awesome. The iPad looks fun, is fairly inexpensive, and is very attractive. That being said, I seriously doubt the average Apple consumer who is used to paying 99 cents for music (or stealing it for free) will be chomping at the bit to pay $10-15 for an Ebook. Something needs to change there.
