How much should a book cost?

The lawsuit by the US Department of Justice against Apple hangs over the London Book Fair that’s been going on this week. It alleges that Apple conspired with publishers to raise eBook prices by switching from wholesale – which Amazon used, where they sell the book to a retailer at a fixed price and the retailer decides how much it costs to the reader – to the agency model, where the publishers set a price and Apple just takes a cut. When the publishers switched over, eBooks immediately jumped in price, from Kindles £9.99 to something closer to physical hardbacks. This fact is one of the reason behind the lawsuit, and I think a lot of ordinary readers would see it as evidence of collusion. Without all the cost of printing, shipping and warehousing, shouldn’t eBooks be a lot cheaper that physical ones?

That whole idea is based on the mistaken assumption that the physical book is the expensive part. I thought that myself before I was published and began to look into it. Actually the cost of print and warehousing is only about a tenth to a third of a book’s price, depending on who you talk to. By far the biggest expense is paying people to sift through the slush pile, help an author you find there edit their work, and then pay some other people to market it. All of these costs are hidden or unknown to the reader. My books went through my agent, my editor at John Murray, then a copy editor, then a proofer, each draft coming back to me for more revision. I am grateful to all of them, because I know their work made my novels better. The fact that a book is electronically published or printed doesn’t change the need for quality control.

Let’s go back to the price difference that resulted between Amazon and Apple: Was $9.99 the ‘true’ price of an eBook, and the increase pure collusion gravy? Actually publishers were selling the eBooks to Amazon for more than that, and it was selling them to us at a loss to gain market share for the Kindle. Once it had achieved its goal, Amazon would have a captive market and no longer feel the need to take a hit on eBooks. In the meantime it was pushing all publishers for deeper and deeper discounts, to in essence make publishers (and me) pay for the cost of increasing Kindle market share. This fact was as hidden to the consumer as the cost of editing. All they knew was that eBooks cost £9.99, and then they didn’t.

This problem is all over the wider economy. Over the past 15-20 years, we have become habituated to think things are cheaper than they are, with loss-leader specials and fast fashion cheapened by currency manipulation, food and especially meat massively subsidised by government assistance to farmers, to name a few examples. Our idea of the value of things has been completely warped by forces we can’t see or control. Our monkey brains still store value in physical objects, not ideas. So if we are paying that high a price for an eBook, we feel robbed, because we are getting nothing to hold and touch for our money.

So how much should books cost? I think we haven’t decided yet. The era of self-publishing will bring those hidden editorial costs out into the open, by showing what a book can look like without them. If people are happy with the 99p self published eBooks, then that is how much they will cost. I personally am happy to pay more for a book that has been edited, — I still think a £7.99 paperback is great value considering how many hours of enjoyment I will get out of it. We’re going to see how many other people hold the same opinion.