Miriam Zolin on readers’ ideas of where the ‘sweet spot’ in ebook pricing might lie:
[I]f you price your eBooks by offering a $30% discount on the print edition, you’re probably just making the eBook a little bit closer to what people really think they should be paying for a paperback, i.e. too expensive for an eBook! With everybody reading more as they shift to eBooks, maybe we need to price our eBooks to attract readers and maybe our bottom lines will thank us.
In other words, it’s the App Store Principle: with distribution and production costs of your digital product at zero, and with a potentially global audience, you drop the price of your product and gun for quantity.
Update: Over at First Monday (my new favourite scholarly journal), Jana Bradley and her team note that “the developing price differential between self–published ebooks, most under US$4.99 and the increase in some mainstream publishers’ ebook prices as high as US$17.99 raises interesting questions about where the increase in ebook sales is really coming from.” Which raises another interesting question: are general readers willing to settle for lower-quality writing if the price is right?