E-Books Should Cost As Much As A Regular Book

E-book readers don’t like it when the price of a book goes over about $10. Publishers, of course, want that price to go over $10. Personally, I actually hope the publishers win out of this. It’s a weird stance for me to take. Usually I’d like whatever makes books cheaper and thus easily accessible to me. But in this case I worry that the culture of reading is about to take a huge blow from the e-book. What I mean is that it will be harder for the professional writer (who isn’t James Patterson, J.K. Rowling, or Stephen King) to make a living which will then hurt the general quality of books.

Moreover, I see no reason why e-books should cost more than actual books, especially since e-books can’t be sold in used bookstores the way actual books can. And really, E-books are also the same product as actual books delivered in a different form. Caleb Crain has a nice (but very long) post on the background of this situation. Here’s a sample:

“Consumers had come to feel that way largely because Amazon had trained them to, by keeping the prices of nearly all its e-books below ten dollars. Though few consumers understood it then, and probably few still understand it today, Amazon did so by sacrificing heaps and heaps of cash. Most publishers have until now sold their e-books to Amazon for the same wholesale price that they sell their hardcovers—roughly half the hardcover’s list price.”

[...]

“Why would Amazon want to do such a thing? When Amazon first introduced its Kindle reading device, the reception was tepid. But Amazon improved the device in later models, and thanks to its aggressive low pricing on e-books, it now reports that the Kindle and e-books are selling briskly. In other words, with the money that it has lost by discounting e-books, Amazon has bought market share for its e-book reader and for itself as an e-book retailer. To put it still another way, Amazon sped up the American public’s adoption of e-books by unilaterally lowering the American public’s idea of what the natural price of an e-book should be. “