What price e-books?

At the Harogate Crime Writing Festival a couple of weeks ago, novelist Stephen Leather made contributions to a panel discussion about ebooks that raised the hackles of the audience, and started a controversy that rippled out far beyond the borders of this genteel English spa town.

Leather has embraced ebooks with enthusiasm, publishing his work through Amazon.com directly in many different forms, from short stories to full-length novels. He promotes them in a manner that could at best be described as vigorous, and at worst as dishonest, admitting that he uses “sock puppets” to spread a buzz about his newest titles. By this he means that he invents false personas on forums and in Twitter to talk about, and comment favourably on his work. He even impersonated another (critical) author, using the writer’s identity to puff his own books.

But it was not Leather’s dishonesty that I found most damaging and offensive. It was his attitude to the price of e-books. He sells most of his work for less than a pound, and is happy to give e-books away for nothing on the basis that readers who get a free taste for his writing will go on to buy his other works.

Leather’s views devalue the work of all authors, encouraging the notion that any creative effort is worthless, and that those who consume it should not have to pay for it. This attitude is now entrenched in the world of music, where a  generation raised on free downloads now resents paying even a penny a song. Earning a living by selling recorded music was always difficult. Now it’s all but impossible. Unless book buyers are encouraged to pay a fair price for what they read, authors will follow musicians into the dole queue.

The counter-argument to this is that ebooks should be cheap because they “cost nothing” to produce and distribute. Putting aside the fact that printing, shipping, warehousing and distribution of paper books accounts for only about 15% of the cover price, this argument suggests that the value of a book is somehow related to its weight in your hand. Of course it’s not. The true value of books lies in the intellectual effort required to bring them to the reader, the work not only of the authors, but also of artists, editors, designers, photographers, publishers and (whisper it) even marketing and publicity staff. All these people contribute to the creation of good books, and they have to be paid whether you read the e-book or the dead-tree edition.

Anyone who cares about what they read, and who wants to encourage good writing and good books, should be prepared to pay more for an e-book than a cup of coffee.

You can read Stephen Leather’s own account of the discussion on his blog here. Jake Kerridge also covered the event in a Daily Telegraph article.