Hey kids, immediately to the right of this entry is a special Dave Maine Blog Poll which I invite you to participate in. It's a little hard to read--sorry about that--but it asks: "How much would you be willing to pay for an eBook by an author you've never read?" The answers are 99 cents, 1.99, 2.99, 5.99, 9.99 and "I wouldn't buy it."
I know it's impossible to answer this definitively because it will depend on the book itself and so forth, but I'm looking for a general consensus. I'm curious about this because eBook pricing is still wildly variable; my St Martin's eBooks (The Pres, Fallen and Monster 1959) are 9.99, which is cheaper than their bound versions, but many eBook exclusives sell for a lot less than that.
Here's an interesting article on the vagaries of this issue at the moment, focusing on B&N's pricing of a book series:
http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2011/ebook-marketview-the-value-of-promoting-the-first-title-of-a-series/
How this will all play out, nobody knows. But I'm curious about people's gut reactions, so even if you don't read eBooks, pretend that you might, and take the poll! Thanks.
3 comments:
I voted $2.99, which is where my own book is priced, but my real number is $4.99, which isn't a choice.
By the way, I am a trustee of my local library and I informally polled a bunch of little old ladies with ereaders at a county-wide trustee event and the consensus was "under five dollars."
Hi Melissa!
Thanks for your vote, and your info. It's very interesting. There seems to be a consensus that people are unwilling to pay as much for an eBook as for a paper one--dunno if this reflects some prejudice against eBooks as being less "real" than other books (because they're not tangible), or the attitude that they should cost less to buy because they cost less to produce. From the author's POV, of course, the story is identical in either case... But you know that.
I actually voted 1.99, but the I scale the money to the risk involved. For .99 I am waaay more open minded even if the sample is ehh. At 4.99 I would have to be pretty certain that the book was going to be a good read.
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