by Derek Morrison, 11 February 2011 updated 15 Feburary 2011
So there you are! You are the proud owner of a still relatively expensive ebook reader whether than be from Amazon, Sony etc. The reader may be a bit of an indulgence but at least you are gaining on the pricing of the ebooks, right? Such ebooks are certainly going to be cheaper than the paperback and certainly much cheaper than the hardback version, right? Maybe not. Look very carefully at the prices. Since publishers won their war (or was it just a battle?) over the pricing of digital formats with book retail and distribution entities like Amazon et al they have been able to inhibit discounting by retailers of the digital formats they publish. In this business model the Amazons and Apples are just de facto agents on behalf of the publishers; albeit ones that can take a healthy cut of the proceeds, 30% in the case of Apple.
At the time of writing the UK’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is undertaking an Investigation into arrangements between certain publishers and retailers for the sale of e-books. One concern here is that what is happening is a de facto resurgence of the Net Book Agreement between publishers and retailers which was outlawed in the UK in 1997. It’s not hard to find examples of these apparently illogical price discrepancies including the Kindle edition of Margaret Hefferenan’s Wilful Blindness which at the time of writing is GBP 2 more expensive than the paperback version; at more than GBP 1 more expensive than the hardcover is Hugh Aldersey-Williams’ Periodic Tales: the Curious Lives of the Elements; or sample Sherry Turkle’s, Alone Together whose ebook price is within a whisker of the hardcover version. It’s somewhat reassuring, however, to find that at least some more academically oriented ebook offerings haven’t for the moment been tainted by this unwelcome and short-sighted price inflation, e.g. Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age: How Learners are Shaping Their Own Experiences or Contemporary Perspectives in E-learning Research.
We need, however, to be very watchful and be prepared to challenge such inflation – or just not bother supporting it by purchasing such inflated digital versions. Just like the music industry, publishers first ignored the digital revolution, then resisted it, and now are trying to control it. I can’t help feeling that a useful antidote to all of this nonsense would be more and more collaborative groups of scholarly ebook authors and producers who are prepared to ride the digital and disintermediation wave without the involvement of big name publishers and who demonstrate they are a credible alternative to what we have now – and I mean more than just pre-print digital archives. That might help realign thinking all round. Meanwhile each time we pay overinflated prices for simple ebooks we merely reinforce these inappropriate business models. Rich media ebooks of course open up other threads for discussion but, for the moment, ebook readers are still primarily vehicles for that still ever so efficient text. We will eventually reach a point, however, when simple ebook readers become low or even bundled cost items and so, just like cheap inkjet printers it’s the price of the cosumables that will really matter – the digital content in the case of ebooks. The battle is on to condition us to higher prices than the we now expect to pay.
