There’s an interesting post on The Guardian books blog today: The true price of publishing.

Most people instinctively feel that ebooks should be substantially cheaper than paper books, because an ebook is not physically “made”: there are no printing costs. But if, says Levine, the real value of a book resides in the “text itself”, then the delivery method shouldn’t much matter. The fixed costs – acquiring, editing, marketing – remain unchanged.

That’s a tough argument to get across, I think, because Amazon in particular has been very aggressive with ebook pricing. Because ebooks are cheap, Joe and Jane Public expect future ebooks to be cheap too. They neither know nor care that VAT wipes out most of the production cost difference (VAT is levied on ebooks but not printed ones).

Aggressive pricing isn’t new, of course. Amazon has been doing it with print for ages – when did you last pay the RRP for *anything* on Amazon? – and supermarkets often use books as loss-leaders. In most cases the winners aren’t the publishers or the authors; they’re Amazon, and the supermarkets. You don’t really have a business without them, but their demands for discounts mean that it’s not much of a business with them.

This is something I want to come back to when I have a bit of time to do the subject justice: I think the aggressive pricing of ebooks by name authors with backlists to shift, and the rush to undercut their prices by almost every new ebook author out there, could be a form of collective career suicide. Once something’s devalued, it’s hard to change people’s perspectives of what constitutes fair pricing. Just ask the developers getting slagged on iTunes for daring to charge more than 79p for their apps.

According to The Times, most books don’t sell:

Last month [in 2008] Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks book sales nationwide, showing that, of 200,000 books on sale last year, 190,000 titles sold fewer than 3,500 copies. More devastating still, of 85,933 new books, as many as 58,325 sold an average of just 18 copies. And things aren’t much better over the pond: I read recently that, of the 1.2million titles sold in the United States in 2004, only 2 per cent sold more than 5,000 copies.

If the public comes to expect professional cover design, production and editing at amateur-hour prices, I suspect there’s going to be precious little profit for the overwhelming majority of ebook authors. Even if you do 3,500 copies, if you’re doing them on the Kindle store at 99p a pop then your entire take is £1,050 before tax.

Most writers will be lucky to do one tenth of those sales: in 2007, the Guardian reported that “the average sale of a hardback book by a first-time writer is 400 copies”. That’s £120 in Kindle money. If you’re doing things the DIY way and paying for a cover designer and an editor, you’re going to make a significant loss.

I’m not arguing that nobody can make money from ebooks. Of course they can. Some are shifting tens of thousands of books, and making tidy sums out of it. But it’s important to remember that they’re the exceptions.

I’ll come back to this soon, I’m sure.

This is interesting. Ray Banks – who is good – talks about ebooks with Allan Guthrie – who is also good – and the conversation turns to book piracy. Banks:

Authors should be pleased they’re being pirated. I know I was. Over the last twenty years or so, branding has shifted from publisher to author, so when someone illegally downloads and enjoys your book, they’re going to remember you, not your publisher. Plus, it means there’s a demand for your books not currently being met. As for publishers, especially those spending bucketloads of money to play Canute, why can’t they harness the potential of the torrent to their own ends? After all, these are people who like to read so much, they’re willing to go to that extra length to get free copies. That’s word of mouth right there, and I’d much rather see a thousand copies of my book go for free to people who wanted it than see another ARC show up on eBay. Also, P2P networks still represent a no-maintenance, utterly free and worldwide channel of distribution. Most companies would kill for that kind of reach with that little overhead.

I’d just add two things to that. One, many of the ebook pirates I’ve seen are collectors – not in the sense of collecting something and valuing it, but in the sense of wanting to have something just for the sake of having it. It’s the volume that matters, not the content, so for example you’ll see torrents promising X hundred Kindle books and those books have *absolutely nothing in common with one another*. It’s very unlikely that you’ll like Ray Banks and bodice rippers (it’s possible, but unlikely), so I’m not sure that there’s any benefit to authors from that particular kind of piracy.

The other point I’d add is that many apparently pirated books are no such thing: many pirate sites are frauds, listing books they don’t have in the hope you’ll pay for membership.

For what it’s worth I’m not hugely bothered by the idea of piracy, unless somebody’s making money from it. I’ve specified DRM-no and Lending-yes options for my own stuff.

I’ve bought an awful lot of books over the years, but there’s only one I’m really attached to: Blood’s a Rover by James Ellroy. It’s not my favourite book – it’s not even my favourite Ellroy book – but it stands out from all the others because Ellroy signed it for me.

Last night, I got another keeper: Killer Move, the new thriller by Michael Marshall, aka Michael Marshall Smith.

There’s something about getting an autograph that’s really powerful, I think. It’s not the signature itself – I’ve no interest in the impersonal “signed by the author” piles in bookshops, and I wouldn’t think of buying a signed book on eBay – but the whole ritual of the signing, whether it’s an ego-fest like Ellroy’s or something more inclusive and thoughtful like Marshall’s event last night.

For me at least, getting a book signed is a weird way of saying thanks, of letting an author know that they’ve had an effect or influence on you in some way, that their work isn’t just something that’s picked up and read and then forgotten about. Whether authors see it that way I have no idea, of course. It may just annoy them.

I’m a fairly recent convert to book signings, but I suspect that for all the ebook hype they’ll continue to be an important thing for writers – or at least, those writers whose publishers still put out hardcovers. Ebooks are great, and cheap, and convenient, but a signed hardback is magical.

This looks like fun: a free iPad app that lets you browse the British Library’s collection of 19th Century books. From the press release:

The app takes advantage of the form and function of iPad, bringing a renewed sense of wonder to the discovery and enjoyment of antiquarian and historical books.

Currently the app features over a thousand 19th Century books, but it will provide access to more than 60,000 titles by later this summer when details on pricing for the service will be announced. The 60,000 books, which are all in the public domain, are part of the British Library’s 19th Century Historical Collection and span numerous languages and subject areas including titles such as “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley and “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” [with plates] by Charles Dickens.

I’ve been speaking to some interesting people in ebook-land over the last few weeks, and it’s only fair to give them a mention here. So in no particular order, here goes:

Mark Edwards and Louise Voss are doing extraordinary things – as I write this, Catch Your Death and Killing Cupid are at numbers 1 and 6 in the Kindle charts, which is an incredible achievement. I believe they’re the first indie authors to top Amazon’s charts. Mark’s blog at IndieIQ.com is well worth your time.

Scots thriller writer Lin Anderson was on the BBC with me the other day, and seemed awfully nice. She’s a traditionally published (and successful!) writer who’s become enthralled by ebooks, and you can find her books online here. Lin blogs about ebooks here.

Last but not least, Dan Holloway has some interesting thoughts on the whole e-publishing thing and he’s all over the net. His latest novel, The Company of Fellows, is on Amazon here. His personal website is giving away free copies of his next book until the 14th of June.