⇥ Of paper and electrons

On Twitter, Clay Loveless, who seems to be having a particularly bad day (or maybe he just plain doesn’t like me), has taken issue with the way we price our books. This seems like a good opportunity to explain how we do it, and why.

What is that you’re buying, anyway?

It seems to me that the first that needs to be clarified is what exactly it is that we’re talking about.

When you “buy” a book, my assumption has always been that you are interested in the contents of the book, rather than the form it comes in. Therefore, “buying a book” really means “licensing the content.” If the content comes on paper, then the paper is simply the medium on which the content is transferred.

When I price a book, therefore, I start by deciding how much we need to charge for the content. That is the money that I want to make from my license of the content to you.

The cost of knowledge

From that point on, the format in which customers buy the book is completely irrelevant to me. Therefore, I only charge them what it costs to produce the medium: free for an electronic download, and what the printer charges me (plus shipping) for a book.

It’s that simple. In fact, if a customer buys the print version of a book, I’m happy for them to download the electronic version as well, at no extra charge.

The sum of all things

Clay notes, correctly, that several other publishers have e-book prices that are far lower than their print counterparts, often as much as $10. To me, that seems absurd—printing a book doesn’t cost $10. By the same token, making customers pay extra if they want both an e-book and a print copy just seems wrong to me.

Now, you can say that our books are expensive. Perhaps they are. But at least I feel pretty good about the way we determine our pricing.