Brascoe Publishing

eBooks are a relatively contentious subject. Some believe that they will spell the end of real books. Others believe that they help book sales. Still others think that if eBooks are to be popular, there needs to be a rethink on price.

In a report in the Summer 2008/09 Bookseller & Publisher about the Frankfurt Book Fair, it was noted that Brazilian author Paolo Coelho is one of the true pioneers of digital publishing. Coelho had made the decision to distribute his Portuguese-language books free from his website because he didn’t own the rights to his English-language titles. In a subsequent move, his English-language books were made available digitally, on the condition that they only be read on-screen and not printed. Since doing this, the author has experienced increased sales of his printed works.

The B&P noted:

Since ‘freeing’ his work online, Coelho has seen increased sales of his printed books, with two titles — The Alchemist and The Witch of Portobello — hitting the New York Times bestseller list simultaneously for the first time. ‘On the internet, we are not only communicating much more widely and freely, but we are reading more and we are writing more: this helps the written word, it doesn’t harm it,’ he said. ‘People will read the first chapter [of an e-book] and then realise they can’t take the computer on the subway so they will go and buy the book.’

Of course, this says nothing at all about eBook readers.

From the same issue of B&P was an article about the fact that people ignore eBooks at their peril. The article cited the case of Lonely Planet signing a deal with Nokia to sell its city guides on mobile phones — a more up-to-date way of getting information. It discussed Dymocks’ eBook download pilot in the seller’s Sydney store, Angus & Robertson’s Espresso Book Machine in Melbourne, and the fact that eBook readers themselves are presently a long way from where they first began in terms of friendliness, handling, aesthetics and user experience. It also pointed out the fact that while Apple doesn’t currently have an eBook reader, it is unlikely to be far away — and people who ignore the capacities of iPods to function as eBook readers do so at their peril.

But the problem that many publishers are still pricing eBooks outside of what people are comfortable with. As a publisher myself, I know that (often) fully half the production cost of a book is in its manufacturing. This is especially the case for short runs and for books manufactured entirely out of 100% recycled materials. While publishers are, often reluctantly, producing eBooks, they often sell them at the same cost as they do their manufactured books.

This seems to me to be incredibly odd. Publishers will tell you that they still need to cover editing, legal costs, typesetting, design, and so on. But what they conveniently ignore are the costs associated with manufacturing and distribution – both of which are effectively negated when you produce an eBook. I also read somewhere else recently (I wish I could remember where!) that eBook purchasers will refuse to buy an eBook that costs them more than $9.99.

Being curious about this, I posed the question to our network on Twitter. One response, from Lisa Dempster at Vignette Press agreed:

lisadempster@brascoebooks I agree. I wouldn’t buy an ebook for more than $10 unless it was a very specialist title (i.e. reference/textbook).

Some people argue that in pricing eBooks similarly to printed books, publishers are trying to push eBooks out of the realm of the ‘possible’. It is an industry that has built itself on print and manufactured items. But if done well, then eBooks can be enormously complementary to manufactured books – it just requires some left-of-field, creative thinking. Look at Coelho above: his sales have increased in proportion to his freebies.

It doesn’t mean that publishers must give their books away. But what it does mean is that by ignoring this technology, and by not being savvy about how they use the technology and why, that publishers will find themselves in trouble. It could, perhaps, be a generational thing: those of us who are young enough to have grown up with technology may well lead the charge in finding useful ways of producing eBooks that appeal, and of pricing them so that they are competitive.

What’s your take on eBooks? We don’t believe that they will ever replace the printed work, but we do believe that to take full advantage of them we need to be able to price them appropriately. How much would you pay for an eBook? And, more importantly, if you could read an eBook on your iPod, would you do it more often?