What price ebooks? How much are you prepared to pay? It depends what you really mean by an ebook. My own purchasing habits as a reader have given me pause for thought.
Previously, I have compared ebooks for the Kindle as being like well-thumbed library books: text but not necessarily a sensory experience.
I have been buying quite a lot of books for the Kindle during December, prompted by the free classics, The Kindle Daily Deal, and the Twelve Days of Kindle Christmas promotion.
I have purchased 20 books and have paid no more than £1.57 per book. Most have been for £0.99. At a fair reading rate for me that's about £25.00 for six months' reading. A sobering thought for an author trying to make a living.
It seems that price is dictating what I read, and it's all interesting quality stuff. It turns out that £1.99 is about the maximum, I am prepared to pay for a Kindle ebook. That means for the author to have any chance of making a living, their royalty needs to be at least 50%. That should be ok, considering lower production costs and no expensive warehouse and shipping.
So what am I prepared to pay more for?
Well, I might pay £3.99 for a new novel, which would normally come out as a hardback, if I thought it was a must-read. It would have to be pretty special. I would pay a premium for an ebook on the iPad if it was illustrated or was an app like T S Eliot's The Wasteland or Jack Kerouac's On the Road, or a reference book like The Elements or anything that DK produces. Illustrated children's books I would pay for too, even if they didn't have multi-media features.
As a reader, do I feel guilty? No. Should I as an author be concerned? Yes.
We are fortunate as readers that authors will always write, because they have to, even if there's not living to be had from it.
No comments:
Post a Comment