Thoughts on bits vs atoms, physical book vs the soul of a book.

I buy a lot of books. Increasingly, I buy them in the form of bits, not atoms – that is to say, e-books. On the iPhone, I carry something like 300 books around with me – I always have something to read.

For some reason, most publishers* set the price of e-books at very similar to the price of the paper books. I don’t get why.

When they create an ebook, they create it once. It then effectively copies itself. The biggest expense after that point in time is probably in the bookkeeping to track sales and see the cash rolling in. Sure, there’s a little bit of server maintenance and bandwidth cost, but that’s negligible.

When they create a paper book, the have to create one copy for every sale. Not only that, but these copies have to be sent to the end customer, probably through 3 or 4 other sets of hands (each one of which adds a little bit of markup) that the customer ends up paying. I understand why the price of a paper book is so high. What doesn’t seem to be justified, to me, is the price of an ebook being roughly the same, especially when it has less utility (such as, it’s designed to be impossible for me to loan a book to a friend).

I understand why they do this. Politely, it’s called “gouging”. I simply don’t like it, and my motives are purely selfish – I want to buy more books for the same amount of money, and it seems to me that e-books, because they’re Bit Based not Atom based should be a lot cheaper than they are. It doesn’t mean I spend more with them, I simply buy fewer books. Sure, talk to the PR side of a publishing company, and they’ll tell you it’s a niche market, with not many sales. My bet is, if the books were priced at a 10th of what they are now, they’d sell more than 10 times as many. They’d get more money overall. The author would get more money overall (and that’s the person I really care about – publishers add comparatively little value to my reading experience).

Physical books are a luxury item. I understand that, I respect it; I’ve always lived with it. I understand the expense of getting the words from the author to me when it’s constrained by being a collection of atoms. For some books, I want the physical form. For others, I just want the content, the soul of the book.

The soul of a book needn’t be a luxury. e-books should be far, far cheaper than they are, growing the market, increasing the numbers of readers, the volume of book sales.

I don’t know how much an author makes, on average, from a given book. I’d be happy if the price of a book was, ooh, say, about twice that. At heart, I’m a capitalist, and I do see an amount of value added by publishers – they should, in fact, must, be able to make a profit. If they paid the author an advance, they’ve also taken a risk, and if they’ve taken the risk on the right content, they deserve some reward for it.

Right now, it seems to me that the reward is disproportionate to the reward attached to more traditional book forms. I’d like that to change. I’d like e-books to be one of the driving factors behind a renaissance of the written word as a form of mass-entertainment.

* Baen seem to be the prime exception to this rule. I’m sure there are others, most likely in genre fiction. I’m mostly talking about the more mainstream ‘name brand’ publishers – the lesser known brands are already ahead of the game, much like some indie music labels were years ago with digital downloads.