Free Dragon Keeper ebook

[Mervi]

I honestly have no idea, as I've never bought one. I think I saw somewhere that there's a boycott for ebooks that cost more $9.99 (USD). I think people are saying that since the devices are so expensive the books should be priced more fairly. In any case there seems to be a lot of variation between sellers/publishers/formats. With regular books you usually know how much a paperback generally costs, or a hardback, or a nonfiction book about a certain subject etc. (For example, I wouldn't buy a paperback that cost more than 10€ unless I really needed it, but I expect quality hardback nonfiction books about horses to start around 40-50€ - I'm talking new books from brick-and-mortar stones here.) I guess with ebooks there aren't yet such standard prices?

[Nuytsia]

I think you are right in that assumption Farseer - I'm just going on what I've read other people saying mind you - but I take it that new books are more expensive than ones that have been out for longer (the same for e-books as for paper books).

In relation to the pricing in general, I do take the point that the production cost of a book is (apparently) mostly to do with things completely unrelated to printing and paper costs. Also, there are costs related to e-books that you don't have for paper books! (something about formatting for screen reading). So it seems that there's no real reason they'd be any cheaper than paper ones (correct me if I'm wrong which I may well be). I hear that people might be miffed that the readers are really expensive and they expected the books to be cheaper. But I guess what I was kind of implying earlier is that cheap or free deals on e-books could well be a means to get people to buy a particular reader then bing up goes the price. Now I may well have misunderstood the Amazon thing, but I read something about them trying to get cheaper prices from its wholesalers so it could continue to offer cheap prices on ebooks to sell more Kindles. I am sure the whole thing is more complicated than that........ but I'm still a cynic!
That said, there are many advantages to ebooks that have been discussed on this forum, so I don't think price is necessarily a huge issue.

What primarily bugs me is the way that these things are always ultimately about someone trying to make a buck by doing things like making deals so that only certain formats of ebooks are able to be read on certain types of readers, when there's no technological reason why that should be so. That sort of thing just bugs me! Also bugs me that it suits the manufacturers of electronic devices to invent new things that we 'need' to buy and old devices so quickly become e-junk (having taken energy and resources to make, and now probably becoming contaminated landfill).
Yay ranting!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Mervi]

There's a really interesting and enlightening discussion going on about this very topic over at Robin's newsgroup (here).

Nuytsia, I know what you mean. For a readers (and I bet for a writer as well!) it's really frustrating when you can't read something you bought with another device you had to updgrade to, or you can't buy something because it's only available in a different format. It's bad enough that the publishing world is divided so that many people will have to wait for a year to purchase a new book (see Robin's UK and US editions) - we don't need an additional mess with limited ebook rights on top of that. It's like those web pages that say "content can't be viewed from your location" - EXCUSE ME, WHAT LOCATION? I thought this was the Internet? (Sorry, that's another rant entirely. )