The cost of E-books
The price of a mass-market paperback, running anywhere from 200 to 500 pages, is about eight or nine dollars. It has to cost millions of dollars to print and distribute the books widely enough to recoup the initial costs and make a profit.
The same product, made available as an electronic book via the internet, can be produced for a few hundred dollars. (Neither example includes the author's time in writing the book.) If the e-book were to be sold for three dollars per copy, the author and the e-publisher could make millions. Instead, we see ridiculous pricing such as that offered at ebooks.com: prices for full books are just about the same as the print editions, perhaps even more, and books or chapters comprising only 25 to 40 pages are offered for seven or eight dollars. As long as this idiocy continues, e-books will be no more than a niche product. A reassuring point: this situation will probably not continue.
Title: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Organizing Your Life, Second Edition
Price: $12.75 (US dollars)
Number of Pages: 394 pages
Title: Assessing Risk Through Preparation & Honesty
Series Title: Inside The Minds: Leading Litigators
Author: Kurzweil, Harvey; Ballantine, Dewey
Publisher: Aspatore Books
Price: $7.95 (US dollars)
Number of Pages: 25 pages
Update: The Adobe Ebooks offered at Amazon seem to be priced at about half the cost of the published editions. This is a more reasonable pricing schedule, to my eyes.
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