There has been a lot of buzz recently about Amazon letting its publishing partners set their own e-book prices. In case you didn’t realize, Amazon had previously restricted e-book prices to $9.99 or below.
Most analysts believe this move will serve to increase the prices of e-books.
As an author and someone with a vested interest in publishing, I find the change to be a mixed bag. As a poet, it frightens me — no one buys poetry as it is! E-books could serve to breathe new life into the consumption of poetry, but not at a $9.99 price tag, and certainly not at a higher amount.
On the other hand, Amazon is lessening its stranglehold on e-book pricing at the same time that Apple is releasing its new iPad (which has been vaunted as the Kindle-killer and the device we’ve all been waiting for to usher in a new era of e-book reading), and that’s a good sign. It tells me that price wars could be in our future, and this may serve to benefit authors who are less worried about money and more worried about getting their work in front of readers who didn’t even know they existed. Hopefully some of that money will come back to authors in the end (ah, capitalism).
Buy a book with only a touch of the finger...
But let’s not think too much about starving artists. Instead, lets imagine millions of sets of eyes able to preview and then buy books all with the touch of a finger. Sounds remarkably like the indie music scene. If my book is one of them, sounds all right to me! Sounds like an improvement over the present circumstance, anyway.
But I’m wondering, how much would you pay for a poetry e-book, or a journal/magazine of poetry? Assume you get to preview the book and that you like what you see enough to be tempted to buy. Also assume that poets start to pay more attention to you as a potential audience and begin to write poems that everyday readers will find compelling enough to read in a single sitting. How much is too much? Would $9.99 or higher turn you off?
Hit me back in the comments! Let your voice be heard! If this move by Amazon indicates that the marketplace is going to have a hand in deciding, you may have more influence over what happens than you know.
At least I can hope that’s the case. It will all depend on publishers and poets zeroing in on a potential audience.
(For more on this topic, see ZDNet.com)
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