One of the problems with ebooks

So, I was going through some shelves when I came upon a stash of books I had purchased back in the early ‘70s. They were all non-fiction mass market paperbacks with an average cover price of about $1.25. Just for hoots, I checked Barnes & Noble to see if I could get any of these as an ebook.  Turns out there was one (Adam Smith’s Supermoney) that was available, but its price was $9.99. Now, why would anybody pay that much for a 40 year old book about what was happening on Wall Street and the economy in the early 70’s? Sure, my old paperback’s binding is starting to fall apart because the glue is 40 years old. I did glance at a couple of chapters and had a slight case of deja vu (what goes around, comes around: those who don’t pay attention to history are doomed to repeat it….and other pithy aphorisms) so it might be interesting to reread it. However, probably not…unless I can get an ecopy for under two bucks. Then it would be worth my time and effort.

The fact of the matter is that ebooks are still a mystery to most publishers. They haven’t a clue how to price them to make them truly attractive. The current pricing tiers for new books, while not optimal, can be lived with. Yeah, I’ll probably pay $15 for the new Clancy book as an ebook rather than the $20 it would cost me as a hardcover. The ebook is much more portable and easier to hold while reading than the hardcover, and I am not a collector so I don’t really care about owning a physical copy. However, I will not pay $15 or $10 or even $5 for an old (more than three years) mass market fiction book. Other than the truly rare book, popular fiction usually only sells a few copies a year by the time it is three years old because, let’s face it, most mass market fiction is pretty much crap.

What I want is the ability to buy a book and have it both as a physical object which I can use to decorate my walls and a digital entity which I can load into my portable reader and carry around with me. But I don’t want to pay $25.00 for a hardcover book and another $10 to $15 for the digital version. So, I have challenge for the publishing industry: come up with a way to give your customers both digital and physical copies of their books. Otherwise, piracy will be a major, ongoing problem for the industry.