Pricing ebooks for the reader, the writer, or the publisher?

Kathryn sent in this NPR piece by Lynn Neary on ebook pricing, which references this even more detailed and in-depth NY Times piece by Jason Epstein.

I’ve been looking into ebook pricing. Kindle, of course, is racking up “best sellers” that turn out to sell for $.99 or even go out free, screwing with the playing field beyond all reasonable comparison. Smashwords allows buyers to set their own price on some books, presumably at the author’s discretion—I’m sorry, these are obviously amateur “published authors,” not serious writers (you can tell by the blurbs), folks who don’t need either editors or designers, just to see their name on a book cover in the wild hopes that they’ve somehow accidentally written a best seller. Innocence beyond innocence.

eBooks.com has a more realistic range of prices, from $3.95 to $30 in the Fiction category. Sadly, the classics are the cheapies. Jane Austen is $3.95, actually cheaper than a modern rip-off about Mr. Darcy. Even Agatha Christie is priced higher. Anna Karenina goes for $4.95 on the same page as a collection of Tolstoy’s stories for $28.95. Novels priced over $20 tend to have the word “erotic” in their descriptions. For Whom the Bell Tolls for $15. A “re-imagining” of the Brontes’ life during the writing of Jane Eyre for $15. While Wuthering Heights itself goes for $3.95? I’m sorry—I can’t read any more.

Over in the category of Literary Arts & Disciplines (it’s not broken down any further in the main menu, although, oddly, Science Fiction gets its own category as distinct from Fiction), under Composition & Creative Writing, we find 346 titles in a range from essays by nineteenth-century giants like Samuel Butler, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, and Mark Twain for less than $10 to the whopping $60 for a tome on writing about avatars. Wait—$64.95 for one on medical writing. Here’s $79.95 to learn how to write narrative and $80 for a book on comedy. Whoa—$115 for a book on information design (how to make things complex?). I don’t think the $125 book on composers counts toward literature. But there are lots more books in the $50-80 range. Oh! A book on point-of-view for $140! Something from the Edinburgh Press on writing fiction in general for the fabulous price of $164.99. And the queen of them all, an instruction book on writing prescriptions for (hold your breath) $229.95!

You can even buy an ebook on greetings for $6.95.

These are all ebooks, people.

My head is reeling.

Now, I have to give an award for this title: I’m Not Eating Any of That Foreign Muck, apparently fiction mis-categorized here.

And In the Too Weird to Be Real arena, it appears that Neil Gaiman wrote Beowulf. I’m flabbergasted. I’ve always thought that was the first known fiction in English—between a thousand and thirteen hundred years old.

The things you can learn on the Internet.