Another Ebook Benefit—No Returns!
Last Friday's Wall Street Journal had a front-page article on the insidious problem of "returns" in the print book publishing world. Because book retailers can return unsold books, even successful titles can end up with tons of returns if the publisher overestimates the demand or if the retailers order too many copies. The WSJ article says publishers end up having to raise prices to compensate for the lost revenue due to returns, which makes books harder to sell (too expensive) and leads to even more returns. You get the idea—"returns" are causing a big mess.
Even if print books are not going away any time soon, perhaps we can lessen the problem of returns for tech books by moving to ebooks. With ebooks, there's no need for returns; nor any need to waste all that money and paper upfront and ship boxes of books around the country in the first place. I'm sure you can think of many reasons why ebooks may not sell—no good reader device; tried it, didn't work; and so on. Well, we don't need a ebook reader device for reading tech ebooks on computer and perhaps the current prices are too high to generate sales of ebooks. We can't expect people to shell out $30 or more for an ebook that's simply a PDF file version of a print book. I think an ebook has to be priced much lower. If this requires reducing the size of the ebook (and focusing on a narrower topic), so be it. And while we're at it, we should redesign the ebook to take advantage of the electronic format; for example, use a layout that's easier to read on computer monitors, and include multimedia that provides a richer experience than a print book. For a 75- to 100-page ebook packed with information, a price point of $5 or so sounds right. On the other hand, the same size ebook with embedded multimedia could be priced $10 and up. What I don't know is whether such a pricing model for tech ebooks would work for mainstream publishers or are such ebooks more the domain of self-published authors or small niche publishers. I guess we'd find out as the market evolves!
All greetings!
;)
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;)
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