Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Ok, as the title says:
I have had an ebook reader for a few years now, handy thing to have when i am at sea for months at a time, due to limited space on a warship its handy to have a hundred or so books in the space of one book!
Anyway, i went on to the black library website and was shocked, no disgusted actually, £11.99 for an ELECTRONIC book!
Ok i do appreciate that writers need to make thier money and they do deserve it, especially the writesr in the WHFB and 40K universes, as there are a few subtle tie ins and nods of the head to other writers.
But REALLY!?!?! £11.99 for a digital copy of a book, which you can't give to a friend to read when you are finished,it may take a little bit of time to have it formatted correctly but once it is done, there is bugger all else that needs to be done to it!!

Yes i may be ranting, and for that i apologise, but i cannot justify paying over the odds on digital copies, i have a feeling i will be moving on and trying to find a new universe to inhabit and allow my imagination run free!

Yup they are expensive.. all I'll say is, feel lucky you don't live in Aus/NZ, and have to pay for that electricity to be shipped there

It's the same with some of the newer FW stuff though these days, I almost spat a mouthful of tea out when I saw the price of the new Spartan Land Raider.

What book was it? It annoys me when digital content is more/just as expensive as it's physical counterpart. It's exactly the same item, minus the physical items (whether it be a book, case, CD, whatever). The fact that you get the same for less is what annoys me.

I don't think much can be done, although it may come down in a few years. I don't know if you're familiar with the xbox live marketplace, but they now sell whole games available for download. They sell at about 1.5 x the retail price, when in stores it's less than half that. I don't understand.

A little more off-topic but I remember reading that the next generation games consoles are planned to have no discs at all, games are solelybought online and downloaded at whatever price they decide, kinda giving them the monoply.



EDIT: in all fairness I did just quickly check the BL website, and it seems that the eBooks are cheaper than physical retail copies, which is nice.

There isn't really an excuse for it. It is profiteering. It's not like it was expensive to setup the stuff. I could have done it in an afternoon.

GW is all about fleecing the customer they dont really know how to do it any other way.

You'd be better off buying the paperback. Cutting the spine off and feeding it into a copier with an ADF and running OCR it. Then just importing that to your ebook reader as a PDF.

Should be able to do it at a library

They'll wonder why their stuff is pirated super quick, though.

Yeh it annoys me how expensive their ebooks are. I mean I understand that the prices cant be dirt cheap. Amazon has been hit with a lot of criticism with how they price ebooks as it is making some publishers lose money because of the dirt cheap prices. But full retail or more is ridiculous. 6.99 or something thereabouts is very reasonable.

Hell have you seen how much the digital SM codex is? Its the same price as the paperback. Now I understand it has a lot of cool extras (links to rules, videos etc.) and that would actually convince me to purchase it and consider it worth the money BUT it can ONLY be viewed with an iPad. Cant be viewed on iphone or even on your computer or android tablet. You HAVE to but an iPad to view it. Thats fething ridiculous.

I most certainly do not condone piracy, however it seems BL have been hit by that on a perusal of some certain sites.
When will companies learn?
Drop your prices to a reasonable level and people will buy it, if you raise the prices then people will find other nefarious ways of obtaining them!
It is a shame, because there are some seriously amazing books to be read,but then the same goes to gaming systems and figures, i now,really only paint the GW stuff for fun, i am seriously thinking of going down the Mantic route so when i have my son on a weekend, we can have a few games.
But then with shrinking economies and shrinking pay packets, sometimes it does pay to shop around.
I will send the Black Library an email later, i know it will not work, but i can have a rant to them about it, might make me feel a bit better!

As far as i can see all e-books are cheaper than their physical counter-parts.

Priests of Mars is £17.99 in hardback or £11.99 in ebook

Know No Fear is £8.99 paperback or £6.99 eback.

The ebook of a hardback is a 33% discount. How is that a problem? If you wouldn't pay for a hardback, then you can wait for the paperback and get the e-book for £6.99.

I can't see how £6.99 is not a good value-point for a book. An individual book may be bad (and Black Library have many many bad books that should never have been published) but as a ebook price point 6.99 seems good value to me.

Not GW specific but a good read on the cost of E books http://michaelhyatt.com/why-do-ebooks-cost-so-much.html

Also don't forget that the ebook actually costs 25% less than that price, the rest is VAT. This is due to the way that in the UK physical books are VAT exempt, but not Ebooks. Contact your MP now...

* Many many electronic goods have regional pricing. See http://www.steamprices.com/au
* The attitude of some retailers selling only electronic copies of goods is that you in fact get a 'better' product: the ability to use it on a wide variety of platforms without the cumbersomeness of the physical product.

Take a computer game. You could go down to the store, buy the box, have a CD that you need to take with you everywhere and insert into the computer every time you wish to play. OR, you could download from the internet, without leaving the house, and play without need of a CD. I would argue that the electronic version is better and thus is worth more to me for the precise reason that it doesn't have any physical component.

I never thought I'd own a Kindle as I love the feel of real books so much. Having been given one at xmas however I was converted, an incredible device, I've now read more than I ever have in my life.

However, it still hurts me inside when I pay the same for an eBook as a paperback for example, I just don't feel like I'm getting a tangible product, same with mp3s, download movies etc, maybe I'm just old fashioned and like having my collections on display...

If you don't like the price, and feel the value for the dollar is not good enough for you to consume the product... GO WITHOUT.

It does not entitle you to steal, pirate or any other action where yous till get to consume the product just without paying for it.

If you don't want to pay for it, then you don't read it. Read something else by an author who values his written word at a lower price. It isn't like there are not literally hundreds of thousands of other books out there to read.

If reading these particular books are really important to you, then pay the price.

I had expected this thread to be about the fact that 2 other miniature companies have announced price increases in the last two weeks. I should have known better. We only complain when GW is involved

To be fair I wouldn't even bother buying pirate versions of the book, because that still indicates that theres a market for it!

I enjoy reading the odd BL book, but I have found other better universes out there, depends on what you're into. I started reading the Star Wars expanded universe stuff, and someof it is really good. And you can't beat DUNE, the daddy of them all

@Cincydooley

Totally agree, it's not just GW raising their prices, I noticed Maelstrom did the same with their Bane Legions stuff, and I totally agree, noone makes a fuss about it. In the GW haters defense though, GW is the only company that seems to introduce a year on year price rise, at % that do seem unreasonable even in our current economy....maybe that's one of the main reasons they get the most flak......maybe

i have bought 1 warhammer 40k novel. it was an ok novel, = good idea but gak writing. I cannot even find it on the GW website. It was a book about the birth of a lord of change.
I cannot even look at it after reading the goodness of joe abercrombie.
why pay a high price for gak? maybe because it's GW?
books are worth more than whatever palaver GW pretends is a story.

The debate on the price of ebooks still continues...

Since I doubt ebooks will ever go down in price significantly, you're going to either have to suck it up and buy or go without

Though personally I dont like ebooks since it pretty much shuts down a lot of the local bookstores. I suppose my age is showing

I just read this article. This dude is full of crap. I'm not going to present my credentials, experiences, or set myself up as an "expert", but for the love of the dice don't just swallow that line of crap. That's just insulting.

drglnc wrote:Not GW specific but a good read on the cost of E books http://michaelhyatt.com/why-do-ebooks-cost-so-much.html

IMO even paying the same as a paper book is crazy. Part of the cost of a paper book is the materials and time used to actually make the physical product. An ebook should be significantly cheaper than a paper book.

Delephont wrote:
Totally agree, it's not just GW raising their prices, I noticed Maelstrom did the same with their Bane Legions stuff, and I totally agree, noone makes a fuss about it. In the GW haters defense though, GW is the only company that seems to introduce a year on year price rise, at % that do seem unreasonable even in our current economy....maybe that's one of the main reasons they get the most flak......maybe

Or maybe Bane Legions gets a pass since they actually lowered their prices right after they started up the company and only had to raise them this week. Or because the same kits haven't gotten over a 100% markup over the life of the same kit.

grizgrin wrote:I just read this article. This dude is full of crap. I'm not going to present my credentials, experiences, or set myself up as an "expert", but for the love of the dice don't just swallow that line of crap. That's just insulting.

Exaggerated, perhaps, but I can't say it's crap: I've been posting news for the Heavy Gear Summer Blitz Event for the last few days and have definitely lost some hair due to the document conversion required for a few paragraphs a day. The same 'chunk' of text gets spun, fold, and mutilated into the store page text, the main website front page article, a 'Deals' web page, a forum post, a post here on dakka dakka, etc.

Each has slight differences in coding (store/website use html., forum uses BBCode, DakkaDakka uses a different flavor similar to BBCode) as well as text presentation (For different places, certain paragraphs are hidden, title formatting, etc.).While this is going on, there's also editorial processes at times.

Long term I could see trying to write a simple script to take one version and spit out the variants, but that's a lot of time to devote to a tool that would by definition be very specific to a single need to be useful. Or require making another markup language that meets my needs.

Or for another example, I believe author Charles Stross has noted issues with eBook conversions of his works. Some of it is just simple stiff like hyphenation getting confused, transcription errors, etc.

I do think eBooks should be a bit cheaper, but they're not as easy as some people think they are.

Mad4Minis wrote:IMO even paying the same as a paper book is crazy. Part of the cost of a paper book is the materials and time used to actually make the physical product. An ebook should be significantly cheaper than a paper book.

Well... If you' read the article, you'd see that he notes the actual cost of book production is only 10-12% of the actual price. So you figure your standard Mass Market book is $10 now. 10% of $10 is..... 1.00$. So if you eliminate the cost of production, the eBook version of a mass market paperback should cost....... $9.

For a concrete example then:

Priest of Mars
What it Does Cost: $24.99 Hardcover Retail
What the eBook Should cost if assuming 12% production --> $21.99 eBook
What the eBook Actually costs --> $14.99
Price below Productio --> 32%

Wrath of Iron
What it Does Cost: $12.99 Trade Paperback Retail
What the eBook Should cost if assuming 12% production --> $11.43 eBook
What the eBook Actually costs --> $7.99
Price below production: 30%

Valkia the Bloody
What it Does Cost: $8.99 Mass Market Paperback Retail
What the eBook Should cost if assuming 12% production --> $7.91 eBook
What the eBook Actually costs --> $7.99
Price below production: -2%

While the Mass Market discount is less, the other two versions of books are nearly identical in their costs below the production expectation.

@grizgrin -- I don't suppose you'd be willing to elaborate on why he's "full of crap" would you?

It's interesting to me, because people have no problem defending the costs of rulebooks in other threads here, stating that they shouldn't be given away for free not due to the cost of printing, but due to the authors time in making it. Does this not apply to regular books as well, or are we just picking and choosing when we apply that logic?

@cincydooley

Good examples. I think the main problem is one of perception......we know that perception, as a rule, is rarely 100% correct, and I don't doubt for a minute that people see a price tag on a GW product and go "OMG DOOSE FEIVING B*STARRDS"......without really doing the math, or bothering to find out what the numbers are in order to do the math.

However, to give a balanced view, perhaps that's something that GW needs to consider, that the percpetion of the company is as above, and maybe they need to look into the reasons why it is the way it is. Why can other companies get away with price rises with no backlash.....we;ve seen Bane Legions defended in a previous post, and no doubt if I mention Vallejo colours they'll get a gone "internet" defence lawyer as well.

It's not just a GW thing, but rather the e-book industry in general. Isn't there a major legal action going on at present between the US government and a bunch of the biggest e-book providers/publishers regarding price fixing? I'm not sure about the particulars unfortunately.

It will be interesting to see how it turns out, and whether it gets any kind of result.

Of course what it really needs is for one of those large publishers to break ranks, and start selling e-books at a significantly lower rate. As is the way with the market, the others will have to follow suit if they don't want to lose market share (a similar thing happened previously with banks and charges for current accounts and use of ATMs).

When you buy a book what are you buying the ideas and story contained therein or the paper?

Just because the culture of the internet is that everything should be instantly accessible and free doesn't mean that the author or the publisher should give into that paradigm.

My question to the OP is whether you didn't think the story was worth the price,or if the format in which the material was delivered is what sticks in your craw?

It's all in branding. Go to walmart, buy a pair of shoes for under $20. Go to payless, and buy a shoe of similar design for around $40. Go to the next store, pay around $60.

Saying that the cost includes the fees to the author is a load of malarkey. The author already gets slivers from the entire cost, so any argument pointed in this direction is designed to make you complacent with the fact that the publisher is taking the lions, hyenas and carrion birds' share of the books cost. Digitizing it SEEMS like it should go cheaper, but then you have to pay the web hosting, web/reader formatting compatilibity things (as mentioned above).

Then there's the fact that GW seems to be sinking into a financial hole, and needs to get as much money as it can to fight all of its simultaneous legal battles, rather than charging people for license fees and mandating royalties.

So between these 3 things, yeah, GW and affiliated product is going to cost you through the nose.

Holdenstein wrote:Also don't forget that the ebook actually costs 25% less than that price, the rest is VAT. This is due to the way that in the UK physical books are VAT exempt, but not Ebooks. Contact your MP now...

Which is an excellent point:

Priests of Mars Hardcopy - £17.99 + £0 VAT
Priests of Mars eBook - £9.59 (+ £2.40 VAT)

So, in actual fact the ebook is nearly half price.

Doofry wrote:Ok i do appreciate that writers need to make thier money and they do deserve it, especially the writesr in the WHFB and 40K universes, as there are a few subtle tie ins and nods of the head to other writers.

Well the authors probably don't make that much on the books. They probably get some up front (something like £2000 at a guess) and if the book does particularly well then they might get royalties based on sales, but it will be pennies per book. After the shop and wholesaler take their cut, the rest goes to the publisher who then have their costs/wages like design, editing, typesetting and paying the author, the printing and transport will be handled by another company. The publisher get what is left, of course if you buy an electronic book directly from the publisher (GW) then they get it all and don't lose a large of the cover price to the highstreet bookshop and wholesalers. GW books are actually good sellers, but it's unlikely they shift more than 10,000 copies, but if so that's very good for those sorts of books.

Howard A Treesong wrote:

Doofry wrote:Ok i do appreciate that writers need to make thier money and they do deserve it, especially the writesr in the WHFB and 40K universes, as there are a few subtle tie ins and nods of the head to other writers.

Well the authors probably don't make that much on the books. They probably get some up front (something like £2000 at a guess) and if the book does particularly well then they might get royalties based on sales, but it will be pennies per book. After the shop and wholesaler take their cut, the rest goes to the publisher who then have their costs/wages like design, editing, typesetting and paying the author, the printing and transport will be handled by another company. The publisher get what is left, of course if you buy an electronic book directly from the publisher (GW) then they get it all and don't lose a large of the cover price to the highstreet bookshop and wholesalers. GW books are actually good sellers, but it's unlikely they shift more than 10,000 copies, but if so that's very good for those sorts of books.

Apart from eBooks not often being bought through wholesalers except in cases of small, independant high street bookshops, this is pretty much bang on the system.

As a bookseller, I am very disappointed that eBooks are having VAT charged on them. It pretty well hamstrings the lower prices British publishers could otherwise offer on eBooks. It costs more to produce an eBook than people realise - and fiction publishing is not doing very well right now as it is. Expect to see some fairly major changes in the way publishing and book sales work within the next ten years. The current model is really starting to crumble.

As someone who works in the physical book trade, and a lover of books, I'm kind of heartbroken to see the slow death of high street bookselling, but you can't fight progress, eh?

Do people have any idea how much of the cost of a book is in the cost of the physical product itself? About 10%. That is why they cost almost as much. Its the same with music. Have you ever pusrchased bulk cd's (not even music industry bulk, but 100of them). They are pence each.

The fact is that most people who say "i would buy it if the price was fairer" are either lieing or willfuly lacking in understanding of the actual cost.

grizgrin wrote:I just read this article. This dude is full of crap. I'm not going to present my credentials, experiences, or set myself up as an "expert", but for the love of the dice don't just swallow that line of crap. That's just insulting.

drglnc wrote:Not GW specific but a good read on the cost of E books http://michaelhyatt.com/why-do-ebooks-cost-so-much.html

Its not at all. He is pritty much spot on. The problem is that people like you will not accept it to justify piracy.

poda_t wrote:
Saying that the cost includes the fees to the author is a load of malarkey. The author already gets slivers from the entire cost, so any argument pointed in this direction is designed to make you complacent with the fact that the publisher is taking the lions, hyenas and carrion birds' share of the books cost.

Because the publishers do the lions share of the work, with editing, markiting, distribution etc tc. Its not just a matter of print a book and send it to a bookshop. Also the bookseller dose a not insignificant amount of work. The author is actualy only a small part in the work of selling a book.