When Amazon “disrupted” the book publishing business back in the late 20th Century, it solved two nagging problems: One was the availability of books, either popular titles that bookstores ran out of, or “long-tail” titles, which were slow-selling titles, or older titles, that bookstores rarely had. By going to Amazon, you could get almost any book you wanted, usually delivered to you without extra charge, which spared us from hunting around from bookstore to bookstore and coming up empty. And when the store manager said, hopefully, “We can order it for you,” well, we could do that just as easily ourselves and not have to return to the shop. Amazon was almost never out of stock of almost any book, hardback or paperback.
The other was high prices. At Amazon, price became “transparent,” and we could immediately compare its prices with what we had been paying, and we discovered that Amazon always provided lower—sometimes much lower—prices. Sometimes the hardcover price of a title would be cheaper than the paperback version of the same title at a brick-and-mortar store, assuming that the store even had a copy.
So, convenience and availability coupled with favorable pricing was Amazon’s special sauce—which made them a “disruptor,” and subsequently caused the demise of several bookstore chains.
In order to hold on to market share, some online competitors responded to Amazon’s challenge, but to a large extent the publishers themselves did not, at least my publisher didn’t and hasn’t yet, more than 20 years later. I’m not sure how publishers expect to sell their own published titles on their proprietary websites by charging more than Amazon does. Go Figure.
I don’t normally check the prices of the various formats of my own book on either Amazon or from my publisher’s website, but the 4th anniversary of publication of my latest book (pictured) inspired me to take a look.
I should quickly say that I’ve always embraced the publishing industry’s maxim regarding pricing: “Give the reader a break,” so I’ve tried over the course of the published life of my books to get my publisher, in this case, Routledge, to provide consistent and general market-driven price points, but without success. I would love to drive business to my publisher, especially business for my own book, which they nourished throughout the editorial and publishing process; but their pricing makes that impossible. (At the end of this blog I tell you where I had to buy copies of my own book.)
Here’s what I found when comparing the most recent prices of all three book formats on Amazon and on the Routledge site: (HB=Hardback; PB=Paperback; EB=electronic version)
Amazon:
PB: $15.81
HB: $66.01-$126.04 (depending on the re-seller, used and new)
EB (Kindle): $15.10; or rent at $7.30
Routledge:
PB: $35.16
HB: $112.00
EB: $35.16
By the way, when the paperback version of the book came out in 2018 (two years after the publication of the hardback version), Amazon’s pricing was not much better than Routledge’s. The PB version is now priced fairly on Amazon (in line with paperbacks of similar bulk and content), but not, IMHO, from the publisher, which has only slightly discounted the price off of the launch price of $45.00.
Given the circumstances, it was cheaper for me to buy my own book from Amazon than to get copies from the publisher using my author’s discount. That’s not the way it should be. Disruption seems to be an ongoing state, not a single event.
