Having just been given a Kindle for my birthday I am suddenly very interested in the pricing models used for e-books. People are often surprised to hear that they will be charged a similar amount for an electronic copy as for the hard copy (often referred to as the dead tree , or DT version). It is often explained that the printing aspect is only one very small part of the cost of publishing a book, and people are obviously getting used to this idea as Amazon recently announced that Kindle books are outselling their print equivalents.
In the University Learning Centres, the e-books we provide for you have advantages beyond those purchased for an e-reader like a Kindle. They are library books, so they have to be available for everyone, in the same way that our printed library books are. And in fact most of our licence agreements allow for more than one student to be looking at the same book at the same time, as long as overall usage isn't too high. To provide this level of access, we usually pay more for an e-book than we would for a print copy of the same title, and we generally feel that it is worth it for the increased flexibility and access to the resource.
What do you think? How should e-books be priced? And should we be getting more for the Learning Centres?
