I read a post titled Pricing Digital Book Content: Where's the Sweet Spot? I realize this is all still new and unknown but I thought I should weigh in on the idea since I have had to research and think about the topic for about 5 years now.

Pricing an e-book

• Currently

  • Print pricing put simply = printer's cost + publisher's cost  + writer royalty + seller's markup

  • The printing cost being the base that the others is scaled from.

  • e-book is a percent of the print price

Wouldn't it just make sense to remove the Printer's cost from the equation and come up with the scalable pricing based on length of the project?

When we set the price at Lulu for Shine Like Thunder we figured 10 cents per thousand words which came out to be 43% of the book price.

• Benefits

  • Reasonable pricing

  • Consistent based on quantity of content

  • Scaleable to accommodate large projects 100k plus words to short stories

  • makes sense to consumers

  • competitive

  • yet still offers incentive to writers and publishers to keep writing.  In the end the amount that the writer and publisher made off of the project was the same.  The seller made the same markup.

What do you think?  If you are a consumer does arbitrary pricing of an e-book based on the price of the print copy upset you?  Would find buying e-books easier if you knew that the price is based on the volume of content?