Spoken Like a Geek
The technology blog of Neil Thompson
The technology blog of Neil Thompson
The Shocking Price of eBooks
So it seems that content producers still haven’t learnt the lessons from the music industry’s move from physical product to electronic equivalent. Below is a great example of how they just don’t get it.
Juliet Naked is the latest novel by Nick Hornby. I’ve read it (in paperback format) and it’s a good book and a return to form for Hornby in my opinion. However, I would rather have read it on my Sony Reader but is it really worth £11.10 to have it in an electronic format? I think not. More to the point does it cost the content producers £11.10 more to manufacture this eBook and deliver it to me? Absolutely not. In fact the costs are likely to be significantly less.
Lets break that down. What does it cost the stockist to hold one copy of this book and deliver it to me? The same as it costs to hold 1,000,000 copies – next to nothing. A bit of hosting space and electricity. The cost is a close to zero as you can possibly get. Then there are the printing costs. Zero. Inventory costs? Zero. You get the idea.
An eBook should be an additional product for the bookseller not a method by which to fleece the buying public. And they wonder why people are driven to piracy.
What’s even more disturbing is that the alleged RRP is almost £19 – way more than even the original hardback price…
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