The Price Of Public Library eBooks

Robin Bradford Guest Post – Audiobook & E-book Pricing

It seems like the library ebook market is going to follow the bad example set by library edition audiobooks. I recently (like, over the weekend) bought a Sony ereader. I love it, by the way. It hasn’t made me love print books any less, which could become a point of personal budget angst for me, but I do love ebook reading so far. I went to the Sony ebook store, and saw the aforementioned Dan Brown’s newest for $9.99! I had just bought copies for the library through Overdrive and paid $29.99/copy. Yes. $29.99. Same book. Same format. I looked for more books and the prices were similar. Overdrive charges hardcover price for ebooks. Now, all this is going to do is make me not buy new hardcover books in ebook format for the library.. After all, I already bought 300 print copies, 20 large print copies, 20 audio copies (of which I need to buy more as there are over 250 hold requests for the audio version) and 5 downloadable audio and 5 ebook versions of this book.

I didn’t wonder about this until today. Now I know.

Is Fictionwise Burning eBooks?

Via various tweets and links, I was led to the site of writer Piers Anthony, where this disturbing item was posted this month about eBook retailer Fictionwise (now owned by brick and mortar bookseller Barnes and Noble).

There is no direct link to this item. The site is one long list, so use your browser’s Find function to search for the word controversial.

[Fictionwise] October 2009 update: troublesome report that the one-time $15 set-up fee now is invoked any time a change or update needs to be made. They have been paying late, and sometimes in error to the author’s disfavor, not corrected; this is harder to track because they have removed real-time figures. They have censored books, removing ”controversial” ones. This sort of thing bothers publishers, but few dare to protest.

Red boldfaced emphasis added by me.

I will say it again: Writers need to go it alone or band together into cooperative bookstores of their own.

There is not a single retailer out there who can either be trusted or has the courage to stand behind freedom of expression.

Not one!

And that this is now happening under the watch of Barnes & Noble is particularly shocking.

I think both Fictionwise and Barnes & Noble need to issue an official statement about this.

And the affected writers need to start screaming — loudly!