eBook pricing ebbs and flows like the tide and we hear a lot of different pricing ideas from the publishers, authors and readers that we speak to. Some people think that $.99 is the right price to get a reader to try an unknown author and others think that such a low price point makes the book seem unworthy of a reader’s attention. The big publishers succumbed to Amazon’s $9.99 price point, but then adopted the agency model and set their own prices.
So what do prices look like today? According to a story in The Wall Street Journal, eBook prices are up. The WSJ reports: “The price gap between the print and e-versions of some top sellers has now narrowed to within a few dollars—and in some cases, e-books are more expensive than their printed equivalents.”
But as Digital Book World points out, eBook pricing is not as bad as it sounds: “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.”