There is little question as to what is motivating publishers to squeeze more money out of Amazon’s customers for e-book sales. It is greed, pure and simple.
If you go to a bookstore and buy yourself a book, whether it is paperback or hardcover, you get something that is constructed of raw materials and that has intrinsic value. Books cost money to print, they require ink, printing presses, binding machines and scores of people to work them. There is no questioning the costs involved. Once printing is done the finished product must be trucked and shipped to stores around the world.
To produce an e-book involves some expense too, but it is laughable to think that the costs are anywhere near those of producing an actual printed manuscript. Sure, the publishing company needs someone to tweak the layout and choose a good font, but that is pretty much where it ends. Printing and transportation costs are eliminated, making the bulk of the price that is paid for the product profit (as royalties for authors presumably remain the same).
Yes, the e-book is most certainly a boon for publishers, so why are they trying to screw it up? Amazon had initially charged a flat $9.95 for e-books. More than enough for authors to be compensated for their intellectual material, for publishers to pull in their usual profits and for Amazon to make a few bucks for handling the transaction. It would seem reasonable considering the fact that the product that they are now selling contains absolutely no raw materials and costs almost nothing to produce; but apparently it’s not.
Publishers now feel that $14.95 is a better price for customers to pay for data, which is a fraction less than they would have to part with to take home a physical book. It is a lot to pay for nothing but data, and it makes you wonder if they really know what they are doing.
Bumping the price of an e-book up by 50% might seem like a good way to make some extra money, but if history tells us anything it is that people will take a much cheaper alternative when they are presented with one; as long as it is not too inconvenient. The publishing industry has been relatively sheltered from the costs of piracy because of the convenience factor. It takes a good deal of time to photocopy a book and copies cost money, so for the most part, it has always been cheaper for people to buy than to pirate.
Over the last few years, e-books have started popping up on BitTorrent trackers. There are quite a lot of them now. The quality of what is available for free varies, some of the texts are infused with advertising or links to affiliate sites; others are no different to the product that Amazon is being pushed to charge $14.95 for – except for the fact that they are free.
Until now reading an e-book has meant staring at a computer screen for an extended period of time. Now that there are plenty of reasonably priced options to choose from, with e-ink for those who read a lot and the iPad for those who don’t just want to read. The technology is in place to make the e-book mainstream.
The various entertainment industries have chosen different ways to adapt to threats to their profit margins, but prices have gone down across the board for movies, games and music, largely as a response to piracy. While some people have qualms about piracy, a lot more have qualms about being ripped off, and that more than anything will push the e-book pirates into action.
It is not difficult to envision a Napster-esque catastrophe affecting the publishing industry. Publishers are no longer dealing with a privileged few that have money for e-book readers. E-book readers are getting cheaper and there are multifunctional devices that let people read them. The pool of users is about to rapidly expand and with it, so is the pool of potential pirates. An increase in the number of pirates will naturally lead to an increase in the amount of pirated material that is available online, which will make the option of piracy even more convenient.
Taking the quick money now will hurt the big publishers in the end.
