Has the Price of E-Books Really Increased?
Average price of a Kindle best-seller over the past year. (Source: e-Book Market View)
By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid
While the price of e-readers has come down dramatically in the past several years, the price of e-books is reportedly edging up.
According to The Wall Street Journal, owners of new e-readers who unwrap them on Christmas morning will face “sticker shock” at the price of books. In some cases, WSJ points out, e-books are priced higher than their print counterparts.
While there are isolated cases of e-books costing more than print books, overall, the price of e-books has dropped by 11% since 2009, according to the WSJ report.
Isolated cases and macro-trends aside, for most of the books that people buy, the price has actually dropped significantly since last Christmas.
The average price of an Amazon Kindle best-seller on Christmas day 2010 was $8.21 and 17 of the 100 books on the list were priced $2.99 or lower, according to data provided by e-Book Market View.
Since then, average price has decreased appreciably. As of December 14, 2011, the average price of a book on the same list was $7.08, a 14% decrease, and 35 of the 100 books on the list were priced $2.99 or lower.
The average price of an Amazon print best-seller is currently $15.08 and there are no books on that list priced at $2.99 or below.
To be sure, the number of books on the Kindle best-seller list priced at $10 or higher has increased since last Christmas from 22 to 32, meaning that more higher-priced books are being sold on the device.
Still, it bears pointing out that the top-selling book on the Kindle best-sellers list on December 14, 2011 was The Grail Conspiracy (A Cotton Stone Mystery) from Woodbury, Minn.-based publisher Midnight Ink, priced at $0.99. The book was promoted as a Kindle Daily Deal on the Amazon landing page.
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See this then :-
http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/hachette-is-australian-for-ripoff-by-blue-tyson/
Er, that increased number of ≤$2.99 bestsellers just reflects the detail that more of the bestsellers are self-publishing authors, who tend to price low.
Some interesting insights. Thanks!
Not interesting at all in my opinion. Read the WSJ articel instead as there is much more to the story (not good news for e-book purchasers) than DBW hass cherry picked for this story.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204336104577096762173802678.html
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t reply to this kind of comment, but something is compelling me.
Perhaps it’s that it was the WSJ article that “cherry picked” and not the DBW article. We took a look at the top 100 selling books on Kindle as a whole — the books that most people are buying. We showed pretty clearly that the average price dropped from a year ago and there were more inexpensive books on the list.
At the same time, there were more books on the list priced at $10 and above than a year ago, suggesting that for some readers, some e-book prices were increasing.
I think we were fairly even-handed in this article and didn’t cherry-pick in the lease. If you disagree, please enlighten me.