Why should an e-book cost any more than $10. There is no more cost to “print” 1 million of them than there is to “print” 1.
I can understand real books costing more as there is a whole supply chain to support. E-books don’t have that problem.
Couple bucks for the author, couple bucks for the publisher, couple bucks for the retailer and the buyer gets a good book for a good price.
The cost to the buyer is that (if I understand correctly) he can’t resell the book or loan it out to friends like he would a real book. Kind of hard to ask him to pay the same as a real book but take away some of the advantages of real books.
Why should e-books cost more than $10?
There’s the same office overhead, editorial work, copyediting and proofreading, design costs for both the interior and the cover art. Not to mention money for the author’s intellectual and artistic work. But the big cost for a publishing house is in advertising and promotion, which needs to be done regardless of the delivery system, or else no one knows that book is available.
BTW, it was Amazon that did the price-fixing on e-books. They insisted that the publishers sell e-books on their site for $9.99 or they would not let them sell any of their books (e-books or otherwise) on the Amazon site. Basically it was the Amazon way or the highway. They publishers were NOT allowed to set their own prices for the e-books if they wanted to do any business on Amazon.
the higher price is for the fact that ebooks are easy to remove the drm bloat and do what you want with it.
It is a first reader premium.
I think you have a valid point because if an ebook is 99 cents then it is just not worth the effort of to remove bloat and copy and email.
It's not the electrons in the ebook, or the paper and glue in the printed book, that you are paying for. It's the intellectual property. I need 2 to 3 years to write 250,000 words of deathless prose in the form of epic novels.
My 560-page dead-tree books cost very little of the retail price to produce. You might as well ask why I charge $20 for a "three-dollar book."
You are paying for the two or three years of my life, spent in a tiny writing closet, to produce that novel.
