The ridiculous price of e-books - I will not pay it!

I've become very fussy about my reading.

First, quite a number of years back, I made the decision to stop reading fiction. I enjoy fiction, but my reasoning was that there is so much science, history and biography that I have not read and will never have sufficient time to get to that I simply can't afford the time for any more fiction.

I know, that's draconian. I could have allowed myself one fiction book a month or even one a year. That's something a more reasonable person might have done. A little compromise: mostly non-fiction, a dollop of unreality for fun now and then. A little spice on the cake of life, right? That's what a reasonable person would do.

I'm not a reasonable person.

Books, books, books

My family was always what you'd call a "reading family". Two parents, three children and a few thousand books. Had you wandered through our home in the mid to late 1950's, you would have found books and magazines everywhere. They'd be on bookshelves, of course, but that's not what I mean. I mean that you would have found them lying open on tables in the living room, in bedrooms, and even in the bathrooms. Every person in the house usually had at least two books "in progress" at any given time and often more.

I don't want to give the impression of a bunch of snobby intellectuals. Sure, we read those books, but we also had comic books, not so high-brow magazines and silly books too. We all liked to read and, oh boy, did we read!

I can remember visiting people who did not suffer from this reading disease and wondering "Where are their books?" because the only books to be seen were whatever the children had brought home from school. Other than that, no books. You might have spotted a newspaper, but there were no large piles of magazines as there were at our house. How did these people survive?

Oh, television? We watched television - or at least we did after my father finally broke down in 1954 and bought one. We still found time for our reading, though.

Spread the disease

When I married and began my own household, of course I brought my books with me. Bookshelves were probably the first furniture we bought and I filled those up quickly and kept acquiring more books.

My wife was a bit unsettled by my cavalier treatment of our books. Hers was not a non-reading family, but books were something that got much more respect than I would give them. She didn't like me laying a book face down at the page I had stopped at - she expected me to use a book marker. The idea of folding down a corner of a page to mark a place was nearly sacrilege and writing in a book (which was something my mother and I did frequently) definitely was. She fretted when I'd accidentally tear a paper jacket, too.

I'm not sure how our children feel about the sanctity of printed material, but I do know we successfully passed on the reading disease. They have to spend money on bookshelves too.

Form is not function

I hated e-books at first.

Really. Didn't like 'em. didn't want 'em, disdained them thoroughly. Had you asked me about e-books back then, I would have said silly things like "I like the smell of a book!" and "Books are beautiful!".

That started to change when I bought an iPad.

For the first time, reading an e-book was actually easier than reading a real book. i didn't need a bookmark, the iPad knew where I left off. I could make the font bigger or smaller. I could search for something in the book even if the author never thought to put it in the index. I could even annotate as I read and never run out of room in the margins.

I started liking e-books.

And then something terrible happened. I started disliking real books.

What is that smell?

Books do have odors. It's not always a good odor, is it? I still have sentimental attachment to some of my old friends on our bookshelves, but they are becoming a bit embarrassing. Their pages are turning yellow, some of them are starting to fall apart and they smell musty.

There was a time when I liked that smell. It reminded me of libraries. It was a good smell then, but now it isn't. It's the smell of decay and I do not like it at all.

I'm beginning not to like my old friends. I definitely do not want any new friends of that kind.

I have no room for them anyway. My bookshelves are jammed and double jammed. Newer books lie sideways on top of older books lucky enough to have been given actual shelf space. There is no more room and my love for them has faded anyway. The weight, the lack of search, the inconvenience..I want e-books now, and nothing else will do.

Trouble in paradise

For a short while, I was happy with my new electronic friends. They gave me everything I wanted and demanded so little. A bit of storage space in my iPad, and I have plenty to spare. I could still read multiple books at once and, with some limitations, I can even lend Kindle e-books when I want to. All the convenience and more!

Our days of wine and roses were short-lived, however. I started to feel that my new friends were taking advantage of me.

Where do they get these prices from?

An e-book should cost far less than any physical book. There's no production cost, no shipping, no damage. There is almost no selling cost - no storefront, no shelves, no counting of inventory, no store clerks.

And yet, e-books are often priced very close to their hard cover versions. In some ridiculous cases, they are even priced higher!

This is unacceptable. Many popular books are expected to sell many millions of copies. Certainly the publisher and the author have costs to recoup, but do they have millions of dollars in expenses?

It seems very unlikely, because there are technical books that are certainly not expected to have that many readers and yet the publishers seem to get by with far less total income. These technical books are often priced 50% or more above the prices of the best-sellers, but their expected sales volume is far, far lower.

Sure, they have expenses

Oh, I get it: there is newspaper and sometimes even radio and TV advertising. There are editors to be paid, and fact checkers too. Publicists have to spread the word and set up the book tours. The really big authors may even need an entourage to travel with them. Somebody has to arrange the visits to the morning TV shows, the interviews with radio hosts - there are significant expenses with these best selling books.

I am also aware that one high flying best seller has to support quite a few turkeys that flapped their wings madly but didn't even reach the lower branches. Those dead birds have expenses to be paid, and the soaring eagles have to absorb some of that.

Still, I'm feeling cheated

I still feel it's too much. Somebody is being greedy when something like Steve Job's biography is priced at $14.99 in the Kindle version. That book apparently sold 379,000 copies in its first week. It has been 81 days in the top 100 at Amazon as I write this and has also been at the top of the New York Times Best Seller list. There is a big pile of money being made here.

None of it has come from me. I'd like to read that book, but I won't pay $14.99 for it.

I say $5.99 is enough

I have set $5.99 as the maximum price I will pay for an e-book.

That may be unfairly low. I don't know what the cost of all those editors and publicists is. I don't know how many other books are subsidized by the sale of the big ones like this. It may very well be that a more realistic price would have to be higher - maybe I should reasonably expect to pay $10.00.

Actually, because I really would like to read this one, I'd be willing to break my self imposed rule and make an exception. I might be willing to pay $10.00 for this one.

No, I can't do that. It has to be $5.99. I'm sorry, but that's my best offer.

Supply and demand

Yeah, I know about that, too. If Amazon can get that price, they'll ask for it. Maybe these super popular books are not the right place to take a stand - I may never get to read this!

On the other hand, if more and more of us show Amazon that we will only buy the lower priced e-books, they may start to see a pattern. I'm quite sure that they have an executive or two whose job it is to analyze buying patterns.

So, I'm doing my part. As much as I would like to read Steve Job's biography, I'm going to stick to my rule: no more than $5.99 for any e-book.

I'm stubborn like that. Foolish, perhaps, but definitely stubborn.

I'm not entirely alone

To the right of this text you will see a little blurb for a $2.99 e-book. It's by a fellow named John Locke and it tells the story of how he has become a million copy author by selling his e-books at 99 cents.

Yes, 99 cents.

I'm sure he has costs and expenses, too. In fact, that book over there will tell you all about that.

I'd like to suggest that you might want to read that. If you do, and still feel that a $14.99 price is justifiable for that Steve Jobs e-book, I'd like to hear why.

That book is why I set my limit at $5.99. If that book can turn a profit at $2.99, I think a best seller can do so at $5.99.

Again, I might be wrong. I don't think I am, though.