High Priced Electronic Books

With the availability of various high quality ebook readers, ebooks are finally becoming a commercially viable form of reading with a number of advantages—you can carry hundreds or thousands of them with you in a tiny device, you can search the books, you can rapidly look up words in a dictionary without having to have a physical dictionary with you, etc. It is also advantageous for the publishers. Aside from the small initial investment of formatting the text for publishing as an ebook, there are no publishing costs. They don’t have to buy paper and ink or run their printing presses. This breakthrough should drop the cost of books.

The problem is, many publishing companies have instead increased the price of ebooks over the cost of paperbacks, and in some cases, hardcovers. Some are so extreme as to have paperback versions for $6 and ebooks for $20.

I suggest this is because they don’t really want ebooks to succeed. They’re well established in the old ways of publishing. They have all their printing equipment they spent millions on and they don’t want to give it up. Additionally, ebooks, if allowed to succeed, end up making the publishing companies irrelevant as all it takes to publish a book now is for authors to make deals directly with the large ebook distributers, which is very easy and generally requires no up front costs.