GregoryBowers.com

We will price our e-books at a wide variety of prices. In the ink-on-paper world we publish new books in different formats (hardcover, trade paperback, and mass market paperback) at prices that generally range from $35.00 to $5.99. In the digital world we will price each book individually as we do today. Generally e-book editions of hardcover new releases will be priced between $14.99 and $12.99; a few books will be priced higher and lower. This is a tremendous discount from the price of the printed hardcover books, which generally range from $28.00 to $24.00. E-book editions of New York Times hardcover bestsellers will be priced at $12.99 or lower while they are on the printed list.  E-book editions of paperback new releases will be generally priced between $9.99 and $6.99.

—Macmillan CEO John Sargent on their new “agency” pricing structure for e-books.

It blows my mind that they’re still treating prices as though they are covering physical production costs (hardcover costs more than trade paper which costs more than mass paper). I understand variable pricing—a short book or a trashy Dan Brown wad should never be priced in line with an epically long, well-researched, valuable tome—but you’d think the pricing variance wouldn’t actually correspond with what version of the physical form is currently available. Price it higher when it’s new, dip the price a bit if it’s a hot seller to keep it on the NY Times Bestseller list, but then drop the price to something reasonable when the buzz dies down—maybe even to pulp levels—to grab the impulse buyer. Why? Because you can’t exactly return or resell an ebook, so it’s solid money in the pocket.

I purchased Don Delillo’s White Noise for about 10 bucks (for a paperback) online. The lowest price I found for the exact same text, in an ebook format, was… 10 bucks for a Kindle copy. Other places sold it for $13-15! This is, mind you, a reasonably short (~350 pages) work of fiction, critically acclaimed, but released in the 80s. How on earth a digital copy of something so long standing (and I’m sure available for $1 in a lucky thrift store) can justifiably be priced higher than a physical copy of the book, I believe I will never understand.