Why, oh why are scholarly e-books so expensive?

I needed to buy ‘The Music and Women of the Commedia dell’Arte in the Late Sixteenth Century’ by Anne MacNeil published by OUP. It had been well-cited and so this morning I turned to Amazon where I saw I could buy a Kindle edition for ……..£105! I cried aloud, ‘You must be bloody joking,’ fell into a chair, and took a whiff of sal volatile to recover from the shock. But I’m still trembling.

There’s a lot of nonsense talked about why printed editions of academic books should be more expensive than so-called ‘trade books’ and articles have been written on the economics of the situation that are full of mind-numbing and eye-glazing- over obfuscation. But even more nonsense has been written about the e-book rip-off. Publishers are to blame, not authors. What it boils down to is that publishers would much rather sell expensive print books to institutional libraries than cheap e-books to individual readers.

Yet from the author’s point of view it is much more satisfactory to know that 2,000+ readers have each bought an e-book for £10 rather than to know that 200 print copies have been bought by university libraries. For a student, having a book on an e-reader expedites study and it feels much better to have a book always on hand. For someone whose undergraduate days are a long way in the past but is doing research - or for a member of the general public who wants to read the text out of simple interest - a cheap e-edition makes a scholarly book much more accessible.

So, a message to the OUP and other publishers - stop playing silly buggers and ensure that there’s a hefty reduction in the price of e-books.

Keywords: price of e-books; scholarly books; academic books; OUP; expensive e-books;