I have over a thousand books on my Amazon wishlist, and I'm adding more all the time. I try to keep my purchases below $100/month, so I buy a small percentage of books that I would like to buy, for cost reasons. If I could buy ebooks at 1/10 the price, in an open DRM-free format, I would buy ten times as many books.

They don't really know what volume they would do at a radically lower cost, because they haven't tried...and the reason they haven't tried is that they're terrified of cannibalizing print sales.

(Some individual authors, on the other hand, have tried cheaper prices, bypassing the publishers, and reported significantly enhanced revenue compared to a publishing contract.)

When would you read all your books if you bought ten times as many? I think that's a hard limitation of the book market - even devoted readers can only read so much.

I don't read all of the books I get already. Some I read cover to cover, others I read portions of, use for reference, or just pick out a few key ideas. Other times I change to another topic for a while before I get to the book, and end up reading it years later. I'm not just feeding my short-term reading, I'm building a library.

Also, I specified an open, non-DRM format because that way I could apply software to the problem: text summarization tools, staged memory training, and/or just copying sections out manually into summary documents.

>If I could buy ebooks at 1/10 the price, in an open DRM-free format, I would buy ten times as many books.

So if they would drop their prices to 1/10th you wouldn't spend a penny more but you'd have more books? It's obvious how this is good for you, but how is that an advantage to them? They're trying to make money, not populate the world with books.

Further, you have a finite list of books you want. Even though it's growing it's not growing at the speed of light. If they let you get everything on your list for the 1/10th the price then they soon won't have anything else to sell you. Where are they going to recoup the money they lost buy letting you have 10 times the assets for the same cost?

As others have posted, most of the publisher's cost is a fixed up-front cost. The marginal cost of publishing is relatively minor. For ebooks it's almost nonexistent. So if they were to reduce their price, I would get a lot more books, while contributing just as much to the publishers' fixed costs. Since I'm always adding new things to my wishlist, and purchasing about ten percent of the new additions, it's unlikely that they'll run out of things to sell me.

What's more, chances are good that I'd spend more money. Aside from the expense, what keeps me from buying more books is the sheer physical space they occupy. If I could get electronic versions of them all, in formats that let me back them up, copy excerpts from them, etc., then that would cease to be an issue. But a restrictive DRM-encumbered file gives me less utility than a paper book, so I've been unwilling to spend as much money for it.

>I would get a lot more books, while contributing just as much to the publishers' fixed costs.

Gain for you, no gain for them.

>it's unlikely that they'll run out of things to sell me.

I find this hard to believe. Currently it sounds like you spend up to your max periodically. If every buying cycle you were able to completely empty your list, it's hard to imagine that there would never be a time that that list wouldn't be less then your max budgeted about, as it is now.

>What's more, chances are good that I'd spend more money.

No they're not. You've already explained that you're already spending all that you're comfortable spending. There is virtually no chance that you'd spend more. As I explained, it's much more likely you'd spend less.

>But a restrictive DRM-encumbered file gives me less utility than a paper book, so I've been unwilling to spend as much money for it.

What do you want to do that you can't? It will sync to at least 3 devices (I only have 3 applicable devices, so I don't know if I could push it to more). You can't loan it to people, that's true. You also can't copy it around as a file, but I don't see how that's a meaningful restriction.

The other constraint is the physical space. If I didn't have to worry about that, I'd increase my budget. I can afford to spend more, but with books spilling everywhere in my apartment already I try to keep things within reason.

Unless I break the DRM, I'm tied to the vendor. I have no guarantee that I'll still be able to read the book in 20 years, or read my margin notes. If I'm less fond of the book, I can't sell it when I'm done with it, or give it to a library.

Finally, I think the public benefit of getting more books in more people's hands shouldn't be discounted, given that the Constitution says the whole purpose of copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts."

You forgot to add reasonable substitutes. I suppose you could roll that into value but it seems subtly different.

Fair enough, however, $9.99 is no longer the common price point. Most new releases are $12.99 now, which many people think is too high, and the problem is the retailers can't do anything about it because of this "agency pricing".

I had no problem paying $9.99 for books on my kindle, but most of them are $12.99 now and I just feel like that's too much. In some cases, buying the physical hardcover is actually cheaper than $12.99 too, and that's what REALLY pisses some people off. The physical nature of the product surely is at least $1 - $2 of the actual cost of the the book, so buying it digitally gets rid of this cost.

Also, many books are destroyed if they're not sold (hence the "if you bought this book without a cover" warning in the front of many books). By moving to digital, the publishers no longer have to eat these costs.

So basically, eBook pricing is complete bullshit.

How is it more bullshit than any other pricing? Does it really cost github anywhere near $7/month to allow me to set five of my repos as private?

Just like private repositories are a service that brings value that people are willing to pay for, so is having an entire book in a small and portable format.

Ignore the costs related to making and distributing the physical objects when it comes to pricing them; if that's accepted wisdom for start-ups, why wouldn't it be for established companies?

It's bullshit because the biggest part in the price of a paper book is for printing and distribution. and VAT too in some countries, 20% instead of 5%, but it's going to change.

So the Agency pricing scheme is only changing the pocket where money goes.

And keep in mind that in countries like China, the same books cost usually $3, after translating rights, printing, distribution and publishers costs. And publishers still live on this, in a country where people buy much less books.

So what is fucked up is that someone is making money, and it doesn't even benefit the authors.

It's more or less the same problem as in music.

>It's bullshit because the biggest part in the price of a paper book is for printing and distribution.

Irrelevant. Pricing is based on value provided, not cost to create.

>and it doesn't even benefit the authors.

This is indeed an issue, but it is then up to authors to find better representation the way that athletes have so they can get a larger share in the value they create.

It's bullshit when the ebook is more expensive than the paperback book.

If an ebook deliver more perceived value than a paperback to its target audience, why is it bullshit to charge more for it? As has been pointed out time and time again, charge based on value, not cost.

But eBooks are really convenient, so customers willingly pay more for this extra value.

On of the quirks of pricing is that eBooks are VATable. That's 20% right there.

I was going to buy a Kindle this week but this article is making me think twice. I thought it'd definitely be cheaper to buy books. What about PDFs? There are thousands of PDFs on the internet which you can get for free, is the quality of PDFs worse than books in kindle format? Do you have to scroll sideways or something? Or is the font smaller?

Yes, The Kindle can read PDFs. (I recently got a Kindle 3). However it's a second class reading experience. You can't change the font size (you can zoom in/out) etc. It's easy to convert a normal 'text pdf' to an ebook format suitable for Kindle (cf. http://www.technomancy.org/kindle/convert-books-to-kindle-fo...). If it's a PDF of scanned images from a book, then you'll need some OCR stuff.

Okay thanks, so I can assume that hypothetically if I were to download text PDF books from certain places, then convert it to Kindle format, I would then be able to get first class reading experience? Are you happy with your Kindle 3 overall? I'm considering whether to get the one with 3G, but I don't know how good the webkit browser is, what do you think of it?

I've found that PDFs kinda of stink (definitely much better on an iPad). However, txt files, and a few other ebooks formats work wonderfully. My Kindle is stocked with tons of Project Gutenberg books (that you can even download with the experimental web browser) and have found the reading experience really quite good.