John Green's tumblr

A Rant about E-Book Pricing

So the final volume in Ally Condie’s MATCHED trilogy came out today. The last book, REACHED, is a great ending to an excellent series, and I think very highly of both the series and its author.

All the pre-publication reviews have been great, and the initial Amazon user reviews were awesome, too. But then this afternoon, I noticed the overall rating for the book had dropped from five stars to four entirely because of a single one-star review complaining that the e-book is more expensive than the hardcover on Amazon. (Edit: The review has been deleted.)

The hardcover of Reached retails for $17.99. The kindle edition retails for $10.99. As you will notice because you are great at math, THE E-BOOK IS FAR CHEAPER THAN THE HARDCOVER.

But Amazon discounts the price of the hardcover. They discount it so much, in fact, that they LOSE MONEY on every sale of the hardcover. Why do they do this? So that you will buy your hardcover books at Amazon instead of at a bookstore, and then you will get used to buying things from Amazon, and then you will start to buy far more profitable items that are less steeply discounted, like a Mini Tractor for Your Kid or Kim Kardashian’s Perfume or E-BOOKS. Publishers cannot control this discounting.

So an Amazon user writes a 1-star review of a book they haven’t read to blast the publisher/author for making the hardcover cheaper than the e-book. But in fact neither the author nor the publisher did any such thing. It is not Ally Condie’s fault that Amazon wants to lose money on her books.

Obviously, if you don’t believe that an e-book is worth $10.99, then you shouldn’t purchase one. But it’s wrong to see pricing as a simple competition between print and e-book.

In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it’s printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading experience for you.