Fictionwise is on the money here offering various formats. Older titles at very affordable prices.
In an attempt to maintain some sense of order I priced New Moon at Fictionwise. Regular Price: $10.99 Your Price including Buywise Club and Micropay Rebate is $8.41. The Kindle Store Beats that at $6.04, but both beat the Sony Store’s New Moon which sells for $9.89.
Of course the bulk of newish releases are still rather pricy, e.g. World Without End by Ken Follet released Oct./07 selling for $22.00 at regular price, that’s whittled down to $15.89 after club discount and Micropay Rebate. Still pricey, but at least you can see they’re trying to think their way through this stuff. At the same time it rather blatantly shows you how much inflated value can be added and subtracted from these products. WOW…
For older titles though, they’re getting into the ballpark as in Follet’s Pillars of the Earth offered at a regular price of $7.99 that’s sold at $6.45 with the membership discount and Micropay Rebate. So there’s a definite trend to bring these books down in price. Again, citing the price of the eReaders, we need affordable books to make it worth getting on board. And eBooks do not have all the same attendant costs as the ‘real world’ equivalent. But fictionwise is definitely aware of these realities, you can tell, offering some older titles like William Gibson’s Neuromancer for $5.64 after discount and rebates or Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None for as little as $5.09 after discounts, etc.
(WORD TO THE WISE: Take your time looking around. I don’t know if their store is on the blink or whether they’re repricing things, but I found the listed prices changed overnight. Jumped a buck or two. I can’t imagine eBook pricing is that volatile, yah? It will be headache to do posts about them if they keep changing prices.)
So we’re headed in the right direction. Even at $5.09 considering that these older titles have enjoyed years of press, from their first publication on, we can assume that most of the costs were paid out long ago. And with new books, there will be formatting and promotion to be taken into account, but considering the larger marketplace and actively searching consumers, these should not amount to numbers that drive eBook prices near their ‘real world’ equivalents.
Ironically, pricing is driven up by the size of a writer’s fanbase. Ironic, because the longer the history and bigger the fanbase, the more likely that a writer’s readers are actively looking for his/her work and the word of mouth factor would underwrite any promotional costs. I’m still waiting for Stephen King or John Grisham to offer a new eBook title for $3.99 as direct download from their own web sites. I think they’d set some record sales and record profits.
The fictionwise Buywise Club. 36% discounts. The memberships are offered of various lengths starting at $29.95 for a year and climbing to $124.95 for five years. You’ll see by clicking the link that the Buywise Club offers considerable savings.
Fictionwise offers their books in the following MULTIFORMATS
eReader [-er.PDB]Â Â Adobe [.PDF]Microsoft [.LIT]Palm Doc [.PDB] PalmOS
Rocket/REB1100 [.RB] Franklin [.FUB] Hiebook [.KML] Sony Reader [.LRF] Isilo [-IS.PDB] Mobipocket [.PRC] Kindle [.MOBI] OEBFF Full VGA [.IMP] OEBFF Half VGA [.IMP]
You can read Fictionwise.com’s full format explanation here.
You can check out their eReader here.
