***Important changes in ebook industry, please read!***

[Maria]

I read about this last week and all I will say at this point is that if the cost of books continues to escalate and the cost of purchasing a book in paperback is cheaper than in ebook...then I will have no choice but to purchase the paperback. When the cost gets too much for that I will have to buy less books and in the long run....this will hurt them as much as me.

[David]

Does anyone remember when music went from vinyl to CD's? Even though a compact disc was incredibly cheap to produce and distriubte the cost of an album went up. Eventually greed caught up with the music industry and "the people" started their own CD distribution.

I imagine the same may happen with books. Will we all become "ebook Pirates"? IS it already happening?

[rm2h]

I will watch to make sure I do not give these publisher anymore of their blood money due to their greed. I will be limiting my purchases only to authors who are absolutely one I want to have. This decision is going to effect their bottom lines. Library books are becoming better looking to me.

[Wild for Wilde]

I remember that David, that is an excellent analogy. All the CDs I have bought don't play well anymore because they wear over time, I wish I had that money back. Low quality and high prices seem to be the trend of a lot of the large corporations. It is quite unfortunate this is happening. Price fixing is illegal yet these new rules may still pass. It's going to hurt the economy and everyone in the long run (except for those handful of extremely rich at the top who want to keep their multi-million dollar mansions, private jets, and cars they own all over the world). I don't have a lot of space in my apartment and my library has almost no books so ebooks have been a life saver for me. If ebooks become more expensive than paper, I'm going to call all my congressmen and start a campaign because this is just too ridiculous and unethical, paper cost a lot more money and resources!

[rm2h]

Wild for Wilde wrote: "I remember that David, that is an excellent analogy. All the CDs I have bought don't play well anymore because they wear over time, I wish I had that money back. Low quality and high prices seem to..."

The congress people will not listen to us peons. I have over and over again emailed them and the President regarding jobs. I get a message of some bill passed for the future. We still have an average of 10% unemployment and people can not pay rent or mortgage, unable to afford health care, take care of the needs of their kids etc.

They only care about keeping their jobs, passing their pork costing our country billions in debt, passing a health care bill which is flawed etc. They are useless and need to be voted out so that maybe our country would do better with new blood rather then career politicans regardless of party.

I myself live in a 400 square foot bachelor unit with no room to keep paperbacks or hard covers. I will have to cut back the number of books even if paperbacks or ebooks.

Hopefully when sells go down for them maybe they will change their tune.

[Wild for Wilde]

I think the best way to stick it to them would be to only buy from publishers and ebookstores that don't support/sell those books from that pricing model. Although there are only 5 on the list (harper collins, hachette, macmillion, penguin, simon and schuster) they each have 20 to 40 smaller off-shoot companies that support this new pricing model (such as minotaur, little brown, scribner, ace, berkely, etc).

Booksonboard.com, Random House, Harlequin, and their offshoots do not support the new price fixing scam, they are safe to buy from!

[Elizabeth]

I have a huge TBR pile. My strategy combines a few of the above: I have a very few authors I really consider "must reads", but aside from those, I plan to stay with the small publishers and the 2 big ones (well, I think Harlequin is big!) who have taken us ereaders into account.

[David]

Wild makes a very good point about who to support. Well before ebooks I tried to address my Gollum like obsession with books and divested myself of several thousand titles...it was a painful process but part of my reasoning was to recycle books, downsize my need for useless space/real estate, and to have a bookcase of truly meaningful books that I would and still cherish.

Ebooks came along and I am now drinking the Kool Aid. At first I was thinking that I was doing something good for the environment and also good for the authors. Has the ebook hype completely fooled me? Did I get swallowed up by Amazon with my Kindle and Barnes and Noble with my Nook?

What are the long range implications for ebooks? Many young musicians today that have embraced the digital world have thousands of listeners and followers. In the past they would have been hawking cassette tapes in the subway. Will writers have to do the same? Will self-publishing lose some of its stigma with ebooks? Can good books, like good music, succeed by world of mouth without a media giant doing promotion?

[W.]

Guys, guys. I just noticed that BooksOnBoard has its HarperCollins authors back. (Notably Meg Cabot and Neil Gaiman, though I'm sure they have other important authors under their belt.) 00t 00t =D

[Mojca]

Is there any info on when e-book from the 5 REP demanding publishers (namely: Penguin) will be available again on BOB?

[W.]

Alathea wrote: "Is there any info on when e-book from the 5 REP demanding publishers (namely: Penguin) will be available again on BOB?"

I heard something about them all hopefully being back by the first week of May. Keeping my fingers crossed that they're back sooner, though.

[rm2h]

I wanted to buy an ebook for a particular author since she is one of my fav authors but the price was very high. So I ended up buying the title as a used book for half the cost of the ebook. It is sad that a lot of us will go that route instead supporting the author. I can only hope that the big name publishers will face reality and stop this practice. This is just as bad as airlines are trying to charge us for carry on luggage. We are beginning to be charged all the time for corporate profits.

[Jessica]

Just got an email from Amazon. My pre-order for Lover Mine is NOT being honored. They cancelled it.

[JoAnne]

guess I'll be buying even more books from the smaller publishers who'll continue to offer ebooks for respectable prices.

Do I mind paying hardcover prices for an ebook? Heck, yes, I mind very much. You're talking about two very different products, that should be no where near similar in price.

When I first got my eReader, the ebooks were cheaper than the prints. Now, for the major publishers, I often pay more for the ebook than I would if I got the paperback. And now they want to charge more? Like I"m going to be an enabler to that? I'm guessing I won't be the only who will change their ebook buying habits if prices go up AGAIN.

Thanks for the heads up on this, Books on Board!

[Rossy]

Elizabeth wrote: "I work for a small epublisher, and these questions come up a lot for us as we are trying to price our books and market. Do readers want to/mind paying hardcover price for a digital product? How d..."

There's no way that i will pay hardcover price for an ebook. Anybody can make an ebook with a computer, the only way to warrant the hardcover price is in the material and the payment for those who make to book. Even the editing does not enter into the equation as it's a given that a good written book should be well edited; either by the author or publisher editor.

That's why those 5 agencies with hugely inflacted prices for ebooks, go directly to my wishlist for when the prices go down. Unless it's an author whose work i trust. I'm not willing to pay blindly for a book i do not even know if i'll enjoy in the end.

Small publishers right now have the advantage with lower prices. Most days if the blurb sounds good or i like the cover, i'll just click the buy button and get it over with. If i end up not liking it, at least i did not pay too much to grumble over it. If i do end up liking the book though, am coming back for more without hesitation.

[Sallie(GeorgiaGirl)]

I just did some comparison shopping between Barnes & Noble, Borders & Walmart...Borders has been my go to bookstore for several years - I loved the store layout, & I liked the knowledge of the staff however, that being said, Borders is closing the closest location to me as of this past Saturday with everything being discounted 20-40% off the price. I was at B & N simply because a few of my friends were kind enough to present me with a $25.00 gift card - so off to the bookstore I go. Im curious - how a store like Walmart can offer a book for $7.49 that was priced $15.00 at B&N on a mass market paperback and Borders has the same book for $9.99?...If there is a hardcover that Im dying to read & my library is not going to purchase the copy then I will consider purchasing it for my Kindle but Im certainly not going to pay hardcover price for a paperback nor am I going to pay hardcover price for an ebook either. I love books but they are a luxury that when push comes to shove I will not be buying & with the way the economy is going it may be sooner than I want.

[Vivian]

I guess at this point I'll be getting some of these more expensive titles via my public library in ebook format. I'd love to add books to my ebook collection, but I'm not willing to pay $12.99+ for essentially a digitized book if I can read it for free. This pricing model is beyond ridiculous.
Perhaps if we stop buying ebooks at these vastly inflated prices the publishers will understand that we have greater buying power and be forced to reduce the prices. I agree with Sallie in that books are a luxury and as such I cannot and will not pay the premium required by the publishing industry in their price-gouging maneuvers.

[Ron]

Elizabeth asked, I work for a small epublisher, and these questions come up a lot for us as we are trying to price our books and market. Do readers want to/mind paying hardcover price for a digital product?

I absolutely would mind. As I see it, a hardcover book is like the Collector's Edition. It's more expensive, but it comes in much nicer packaging, will hold up better with time, is something you'd be proud to show off, and occasionally includes extra material not included in other editions. Today's eBooks, on the other hand, are roughly equivalent to mass-market paperbacks: small and often awkward, cheap to reproduce, and sparsely illustrated, if at all.

I mention illustrations because they're a particular weakness of e-readers; grayscale pictures work well enough if scaled to the e-reader's window size, but in other cases (I'm specifically thinking of the Nook version of The White Queen by Philippa Gregory, but there have been others), the illustration gets cut off. I don't mean the picture is split between two pages, I mean part of the picture is completely unavailable to the reader. In the case of The White Queen, the electronic edition cuts off part of a family tree and a map of historic battles that form the political background for the story. That's a pretty significant weakness for illustration- and diagram-heavy genres like fantasy or history, and it's a deal-breaker for technical manuals.

I understand that there are some startup costs involved in producing a eBook edition of an existing book, and creating an online store to accomodate 24/7 purchases and downloads. That's why I can accept eBooks being priced as high as the trade paperback price (and even then, only if it's available the same day hardcovers hit the shelf). As the technology advances, however, I expect to see some combination of lower eBook prices and more capable e-readers (better resolution, zoom in/out, faster refresh rates, better handling of footnotes and endnotes). The current generation of eBooks aren't nearly worth the hardcover price.

[Rossy]

It's official now that all 6 top publishers have applied the pricing model. *sigh* I'm starting to hate the big publishers.