Setting an ebook price: What the pirates can teach us

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Apparently we're making them do it.

Will pirates set your ebook price in the future?

From Wired I learn that a group of illegal filesharers has put out a manifesto outlining the conditions under which they will stop downloading films illegally. It made me wonder what movie pirates could teach us about setting an ebook price and combatting ebook piracy.

No one can speak for everyone who downloads content illegally but the manifesto — Don’t Make Me Steal — had been “signed” by 2,000 people on Twitter and 4,000 people on Facebook at the time of writing this post.

Making an ebook price palatable to readers

The illegal downloaders want payment to be to do with content, not bandwidth. The ebook price in the Kindle store is already for content, not bandwidth — either authors or Amazon pay the bandwidth cost depending on which royalty model is in play.

More relevant to setting an ebook price, the pirates want video download pricing to be transparent and for prices not to exceed a third of the cost of a cinema ticket. Here there is a clear parallel between this set of demands and the views of a vocal group of ebook readers. Both want to use an arbitrary benchmark of their choosing to divine a reasonable price for a digital item.

The authors of “Don’t Make Me Steal” (apparently we’re making them do it)  see the reasonable cost of a download as being tied to the price of seeing the same thing in the cinema. Why? They don’t say. Ebook readers tend to see an ebook price as needing to be relative to (and substantially less than) the price of printed books. Why? Because they think they can divine the saving to publishers of not having to print, transport and warehouse books.

I saw this first hand in a running exchange I and other Kindle authors had with someone going by “Howard” in the comments section of Teleread. In that exchange Howard says he does not steal ebooks himself but nonetheless has insight into the thinking of thieves and would-be pirates:

What WILL motivate [readers] to get involved in [ebook piracy] is being charged excessive prices…

Online and offline it’s the right of consumers to decide not to pay a price they think is too high. The film pirates seem to argue they have an alternative right: the right to steal the content they think is over-priced. To the cheers of shoplifters everywhere, Howard declares stealing “excessively priced” ebooks to be “natural justice”.

People in Howard’s camp believe that all readers are qualified to determine the cost of producing a book and, therefore, determine what is a reasonable ebook price. It’s an extraordinary view. I write and publish books myself but I couldn’t begin to guess what every book on the planet cost to produce and presume to set the ebook price for every book. There’s certainly no way I could argue, as Howard does, that I’m qualified to judge the production cost of a commodity I’ve only ever consumed.

My opinion as an author and publisher is, however, irrelevant, which is why Howard’s view about setting an ebook price has to be given weight. The music industry stemmed the tide of piracy — only in as much as it has — by slashing prices and removing restrictions (like having to buy whole albums).

In short, there is plenty we can learn about setting our ebook price from pirates and the people who think theft is natural justice (robbing from rich artists to entertain poor consumers).

Ebooks are digital goods; DRM (which I don’t put on my books) can be cracked; and Howard’s argument about human rationalisation is solid if disappointingly so: if you set your ebook price at what the reader feels is reasonable — rightly or wrongly — the reader is less likely to steal it.

That doesn’t mean we can’t have a bit of fun with Howard and the idea that it’s reasonable for consumers to steal what they find too expensive…

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Chris Meadows has an interesting post on ads as a possible way to keep ebook prices down to thwart piracy. (Can ads in e-books fight piracy with low prices?)

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About Steven Lewis

Steven Lewis is a writer, ghostwriter, journalist and publisher. He also gives training in online marketing and social media.

  • Pingback: Tweets that mention Setting an ebook price: What we can learn from piratesKindle Writers -- Topsy.com

  • http://www.teleread.com Howard

    A pretty good post all in all. Speaking as the ‘Howard’ in question I am only a little disappointed, still, that Steven writes about the downloading behaviour in such a slightly holier than thou way. My comments on Teleread and elsewhere targeted by Steven are hardly unique or special.
    Refusing to accept that human behaviour is not robotic and driven by strict adherence to rules and laws and regulations is a little naive. Everyone has tendencies to break rules when they feel them to be unfair. The degree that they do is usually determined by the degree of perceived unfairness, the strength of peer pressure, the effort required and the chances of getting caught.
    The vagaries of life have conspired to bring about a situation with electronic media such as MP3s and eBooks where the last three of the four factors are extremely low.
    This is not something I invented. It is not something pirates invented. It is human nature and those who chose to pontificate more than cogitate, and who chose to believe they can change human nature rather than adapt and use human nature to their benefit are always destined to be on the losing side of history.
    I welcome your conclusions Steven. I hope writers and agents and publishers and retailers follow. The truth, as I see it, is that there is enormous potential for growing the publishing industry and of expanding sales and royalties by adapting to the world instead of fighting it. Of course like every stage of evolution in nature, there are winners and there are losers. But that is the nature of change.

    In closing I would suggest to Steven that it is slightly unfair to claim that I say stealing is ‘reasonable’. I have never said that. I have said there is a “certain natural justice about pirating and downloading”. I believe there is a world of difference. But seeing as the article closes in a pleasant and generous way I won’t press it home …. ;)

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  • Al

    For those that say they frown on people stealing overpriced books, I say to look at their speedometer when driving at the prevailing rate on the freeway and ask themselves why they think it is OK to break that law?

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  • John Skinner

    Pirates are forming the new business models

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  • John Skinner

    Pirates are forming the new business models

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  • Eagles83

    I don’t agree whole-heartedly with this “Howard” character but there is something to the idea that unfair pricing/availability leads to piracy. For example, my wife is an avid reader and she loves the Harry Potter series. I had purchased her an ebook reader for Christmas so that she could take all of these books with her easily rather than carrying them in a bag for a long trip. Unfortunately JK Rowling is a short-sighted fool. She has stated that she refused to allow her books to be created in digital form because she is afraid of lost profit from piracy. This is utter lunacy because it is the true lack or perceived lack of options that creates piracy. If someone is willing to purchase the material digitally when there is a means to but is prevented for some various reason then it could lead them down the illegal path.

    In our case I wasn’t aware of JK’s ebook policy before buying the device and we somewhat felt robbed by it. A quick google search later revealed that all of her books were available in ebook form on a torrent site for free. Someone had created them anyway and simply released them for free. If she would have simply allowed her book to be sold digitally those files may have never existed. We already own all of her books in hardcover form and were willing to give her even more money to own them in a digital form but now she has now stripped herself of that opportunity to make more money from repeat customer.

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  • Pingback: A Pirate’s Ultimatum « A Digital Magician

  • http://twitter.com/originaloflaura Laura Roberts

    Oh, ew. I definitely don’t want ads in my ebooks! That, to me, is far worse than piracy. As Cory Doctorow has repeatedly argued, piracy is actually good for writers, because it means that people are reading your books. And while I would certainly prefer to be paid for my hard work as a writer, rather than pirated, the idea of running ads in my ebooks to somehow compensate for lost sales is far more disagreeable. Perhaps Cory and I are just being naïve, but I choose to believe that people reading my work, in whatever way they choose, is far better than forcing people to pay exorbitant prices or put up with obnoxious ads to get at my content.

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