How much would you pay for an ebook? Recently I have noticed that an increasing number of books are only available in ebook format and have also come with an increased price tag. The beauty of books is that they are not just stories, they are objects. We can buy the beautiful cloth bound covers for lots of £££ or stick to our bargain basement copies at charity shops and swap sites. This way it is largely the reader who is in control of the price they pay for a particular book or to a certain extent determine what it is worth. Of course readers don't set the recommended retail prices, but there are always cheaper alternatives to be found with paper books. With ebooks this is just not possible. How would we go about downloading a second-hand copy of an ebook? How many of us can borrow electronic versions from our libraries? Granted that this may be possible in the future, but not for right now. The price of an ebook is the price that the website says. I am an avid shop-arounder and let me tell you whether you buy from Kobo, Kindle or iBooks, ebook prices are worryingly uniform.
Knowing then, that you have to pay that set price for an ebook, how do we decided what is reasonable? Usually we associate cost with the amount of labour that has gone into making something. For instance, we are more willing to pay higher prices for something that has been stitched by hand instead of on a machine. How do ebooks fit into this? Who are we paying when we buy an ebook? We aren't paying the sales assistant who has had to unpack, shelve and then sell the book to us. We aren't paying the lorry driver who delivered it to us, nor the warehouse worker who packed it nicely in the boxes. Not even the people who work in book-binding to get all the pages in the right order for us. The truth is all of the manual labour that is present in the production, distribution and selling of books is absent when it comes to their electronic counterparts. Now this isn't a rant about how ebooks will put people out of jobs, but a look at how the money that we pay for these products doesn't go to quite as many people as paper copies. Yes there are still people who work on editing and publicity and getting the book to online distributors, but don't all of these job roles exist anyway? That's not to mention the author who had to write the books. The sad truth is that unless self-published not an awful lot of money goes to those who write what we read regardless of book format.
I'm all for fair pricing. I like to buy new books by emerging authors at full price to offer my support. I like to purchase a mixture of paper books and ebooks and I love the opportunity for increasing people's access to books and reading. I do not, however, like that publishers and book retailers are exploiting new technology in order to exploit us. Simply put I can find no reason for ebooks to cost more that £5 and even then that's on the expensive side. It's ok for higher quality products to be more expensive, but it is not ok for them to be over-priced i.e. priced more than they are worth. Who am I to decide how much a book is worth? Well, I'm the reader. Aren't I the only one who can determine that?
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