How much is a book?

Down the rabbit-hole

I had read this review on goodreads which made me chuckle about a book called “Mistborn: The Final Empire” by Brandon Sanderson, and decided to investigate further. Little did I know I would spend the next 48 hours in the dark underbelly of book pricing.

Trusty iPad in hand, I used the Amazon application to look it up. Preferring the electronic version to the printed version for reasons of space and convenience, I found myself on the Mistborn: The Final Empire (Mistborn, Book 1) [Kindle Edition] page, where I was informed:

Kindle Price: $7.99 includes free wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet
Sold by: Macmillan
This price was set by the publisher

“Cheap enough to take a shot at.”, I figured “Might as well buy it”. Now an odd side effect of Apple’s App Store policy is that an app that is essentially a web page is still bound by the whole in-app purchasing rubbish (as stated before, a great example of Apple not doing the right thing by their customers). You cannot purchase Kindle books via this application, so I opened the browser, logged in and went to the page.

When I visited this same page via my browser, I was greeted by a friendly little message, where the “Buy Now” button normally is, that stated:

This title is not available for customers from:
Australia

This page, interestingly, also tells you “Pricing information not available.” where normally the price would be displayed.

My curiosity was piqued when I noticed the little information box still said there was a Kindle version available, but for $13.53. How strange…

The link takes you to the page for Final Empire: Mistborn: Book One (Mistborn Trilogy 1) [Kindle Edition] published by Gollancz and sold by Hachette Book Group, instead of the previous Tor Books edition sold by Amazon Digital Services. The price information states:

Kindle Price: $13.53 includes applicable taxes & free international wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet
Sold by: Hachette Book Group
This price was set by the publisher

OK, so it’s published by someone else, but it’s quite a bit more expensive. Let’s investigate further by parking ourselves behind a US proxy server, and visiting the above pages as if we are in the USA.

The first page informs you of the same price as the iPad app when visited, but the second, Gollancz edition, now states:

This title is not available for customers from:
United States

Interestingly, the Tor published Mass Market Paperback edition is exactly the same price as the Tor published Kindle edition, and is available for me to buy, even in Australia. So the price differential might be because the Gollancz edition is more expensive and (surprise!) is the one available outside the USA, whereas the Tor edition is cheaper and the only available inside the USA. In this case, it’s easy to see why Amazon insists on the “This price was set by the publisher” disclaimer on their pages.

As a final note, setting the proxy to appear as somewhere in the Middle East changes the Gollancz Kindle edition to be:

Kindle Price: $9.59 includes free international wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet

which tends to imply that the publisher is tailoring their prices to the region they are selling to(remember the “This price was set by the publisher” disclaimer we saw?).

The Other Amazon

Given that Gollancz is an arm of Orion Publishing Group, a UK company, the next stop on our adventure is to investigate whether our theory of this edition being more expensive than the Tor edition hold up. Let’s head to Amazon UK and see what we can find.

Here we see that only the Gollancz editions are available which makes sense; as we saw before, Tor is publisher inside the USA, Gollancz outside. Here is the Final Empire: Mistborn: Book One (Mistborn Trilogy 1) [Kindle Edition] pricing information:

Kindle Price: £4.99 includes VAT & free wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet
You Save: £4.00 (44%)
Unlike print books, digital books are subject to VAT.
This price was set by the publisher

and here is the The Final Empire: Mistborn Book One [Paperback] pricing information:

Price: £4.74 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions.

Notice how similar the price is inside the UK between the Paperback and the Kindle edition? This makes sense, encourages people buy the one they prefer, and mirrors the US situation closely. It also shows, in contrast to the US pricing, large discounts below the RRP for the Paperback, which may have an effect on our theory.

The Local Situation

Lately, local Australian retailers have been complaining that shopping online overseas, for items under AU$1000, is basically tax free as customers do not pay our 10% sales tax (GST) on these imported items, whereas local retailers have to pay this tax, making their prices more expensive than overseas counterparts.

I decided to check out the sites of the local big booksellers and get prices for the paperback and eBooks (of any type) and see how they compare to the previous prices.

Dymocks is one of the biggest book retailers left, and their site tells me I can buy the Tor Mass Market Paperback edition for AU$12.95 while the Gollancz Paperback edition can be bought for a whopping AU$24.99.

Borders, a purely online presence in Australia after their bankruptcy, will sell you the Tor Mass Market Paperback edition for AU$13.95 while the Gollancz Paperback edition comes in at AU$23.99. They also carry the Gollancz ePub eBook version for AU$12.99.

This seems to reinforce the idea that the Gollancz edition is simply more expensive, but as we’ll see soon, there is more to this story that that simple case, and the implications are worrying.

The Breakdown

Let’s tally this all up and convert everything to one currency and see where we stand. I used the XE currency converter to determine exchange rates used for calculation, which were:

1.00 USD = 0.967029 AUD
1.00 GBP = 1.51007 AUD

One thing to note is the sell-price vs. the RRP. Let’s quickly look into this for this particular book:

UK Gollancz Paperback RRP: £8.99 becomes: AU$13.58
US Tor Books Mass Market Paperback RRP: $7.99 becomes: AU$7.73

So now we can make a table to look a all the data so far, and add a baseline of the US Tor editions which we theorized would be the cheapest:

Item	Price (AUD)	Difference
US Tor Paperback RRP	$7.73	0 %
Amazon US Tor Paperback	$ 7.73	0 %
Amazon US Tor Kindle	$ 7.73	0 %
Amazon US Gollancz Kindle	$13.09	+69.3 %
UK Gollancz Paperback RRP	$13.58	+75.7 %
Amazon UK Gollancz Paperback	$ 7.16	-7.4 %
Amazon UK Gollancz Kindle	$ 7.54	-2.5 %
Dymocks Tor Paperback	$12.95	+67.5 %
Dymocks Gollancz Paperback	$24.99	+223.3 %
Borders Tor Paperback	$13.95	+80.5 %
Borders Gollancz Paperback	$23.99	+210.3 %
Borders Gollancz ePub	$12.99	+69.0 %

Let’s look at this table and re-evaluate our theory. It turns out that the Gollancz Paperback is in fact the cheapest and comparable to the pricing of the Kindle version and both of these are comparable to the pricing of the US Tor editions due to heavy discounting in the UK.

Given the complaints voiced by local retailers, let’s see the effect GST actually has on the local prices by modifying the above rows to remove the GST effect entirely:

Dymocks Tor Paperback	$11.77	+52.2 %
Dymocks Gollancz Paperback	$22.72	+193.9 %
Borders Tor Paperback	$12.68	+64.0 %
Borders Gollancz Paperback	$21.81	+182.1 %
Borders Gollancz ePub	$11.81	+52.8 %

As you can see, there is more at play here than the GST. These retailers are selling close to or at local RRP, and the prices set by the local publishers are way out of touch with reality.

Finally, A Summary

Our theory of the Gollancz editions being more expensive than the Tor editions seems to be quite valid if you ignore the massive discounts in the UK, but it turns out that the Australian book sellers are appreciably more expensive that the overseas retailers and can’t even compete with the standard UK RRP. The local retailers will not, or more likely cannot, reduce pricing down to where it needs to be to compete.

Kindle prices are set so as to not undercut the Australian local pricing (hence the “tailored” pricing from Amazon US), but even then, for some odd reason, the RRP of the Gollancz Paperback edition is bordering on double the eBook version, showing a lack of parity unique among the markets. I can only imagine this is to encourage the growth of the eBook market in Australia, at which time I don’t imagine the Paperback will drop in price; far more likely is that the eBook will increase in price.

Is the pricing of the eBooks fair? Compared to the US version, no. You could argue that the Gollancz Paperback is better quality than the Tor Paperback, and maybe that is the reason for the price differential between these editions, but that has little bearing on on why two, almost identical, Kindle books sold by Amazon differ in price so greatly. The pricing structure of eBooks is so artificial that it’s borders on ridiculous.

If I do end up buying this book, it won’t be the electronic version, it will most likely be the Gollancz Paperback version from Amazon UK (free shipping over £25 to Australia and New Zealand) and not any of the electronic editions because even with the cost to the manufacturer, publisher and retailer, I can still buy flattened, processed dead wood with ink bashed into it, and get it shipped to me in Australia from across the world, cheaper than a squirt of data which would take a minute to deliver and cost almost nothing to anyone involved.

Actually, after all this, I pretty much cannot be bothered getting the physical book. I’ll keep my money and spend it on something else, depriving an author, a publisher and a retailer of money they otherwise would have got from me had this whole, sad, state of affairs not existed. Imagine the outcome had I been able to hit the buy button that first time and received the eBook to my Kindle.

A truly international, fair-priced eBook only publisher is inevitable if this keeps up, or maybe Apple (or someone else) will give people powerful tools to build nicely formatted eBooks and publish them directly without going through a traditional publisher. The incumbents should beware, they may find themselves in an uncomfortable, indefensible position before too long.

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