Why Pay for an e-book? ---- Part II: Everything for Nothing

In my previous article I couldn't explain why an e-book is more expensive than a paperback when it costs next to nothing to make it available. In my attempt to find the same book cheaper I found that most torrent copies available for free are usually full of mistakes and not really worth bothering with. So what happens now? Are you going to pay $11.59 for a 72 page e-book written 60 years ago (Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea), when you suspect that someone is taking more than his fair cut?

Of course not! There's that great institution called the public library. Nowadays you don't even have to go there. Just find one you can borrow from, fill-in a couple of forms and the book is yours for free for a week or two.

But let's say you want to own the book for free. Well, that's not so difficult either. Although most torrent copies circulating on the net are OCR copies of the books that haven't been proofread (in other words worthless), lo and behold there are some websites that have good copies of the actual book.

Why Pay for an e-book? ---- Part I: Something Worth Nothing

You have just bought an e-book reader or a tablet device and enjoy the reading experience. You appreciate that it can actually fit thousands of books which you can now take with you anywhere from your night table to Timbuktu. Now you want to get books to put in it. You've discovered that you can download most books published before 1922 for free from places like Gutenberg. Great, but you can't spend the rest of your life reading Pride and Prejudice or Great Expectations. You want to get on to people like Faulkner, Orwell, Hemingway. Let's say you want to read Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. You look it up in Amazon and you discover that something is wrong with the prices. They are selling a 72 page paperback for $8.50 and the e-book for $11.59.

It doesn't make sense, does it? An e-book does not need paper or printing, it doesn't require a warehouse, and it has no transportation costs. It doesn't need a physical store to be sold in or staff to sell it to you. It's sold directly to the customer through an e-store. Hemingway's share couldn't be more than 10-15%, yet the publisher finds it necessary to boost his price a further 36%. What are his extra expenses?