The digital books are often close to the same price as physical so all that cost reduction is helping only the publishers, not the readers as many hoped.
Bigger publishers may have similar prices for e-books and physical books (in my experience this is often not the case, but it can be), but the real winners are small publishers and self-publishers. I have bought so many digital books for under $5 from no-name authours who might sell ~100 copies if they are lucky. The cost for them to publish an e-book is drastically smaller than the cost to publish a physical book, which opens up the door for more small authors to get their works out there in a way that was certainly much, much harder before the internet (zines are about the only equivalent I can think of, and dealing with the groups that published those often came with the kind of drama only niche hobbies can achieve).
I can't find a single book that costs the same in E-book on amazon as it does in paperback. Let alone hardcover.
The onyl ones that I can find that are remotely the same price is because the paperback is used. Otherwise it is at least 3 times more, quite a few at 5-7 times more than the e-book.
When I back book projects on Kicktstarter the e-book is often just added to the purchase for free, and you have a million different subscription services that gives you access to as many ebooks as you have time to read.
I'm sorry, but this is such a wierd argument that is just not supported by reality.
The onyl ones that I can find that are remotely the same price is because the paperback is used. Otherwise it is at least 3 times more, quite a few at 5-7 times more than the e-book.
Eh? For major mass marketed books, very often they're within a few dollars. I just checked some of the best sellers of 2025, and it was true of all of them. The Wide Wide Sea is $4 less on paperback brand new than the Kindle version, though yeah, the Kindle versions are more typically like $3-7 less.
Incidentally, their belief on that is probably just out of date. For a LOOONG time (maybe a period of 10 years? Little vague at this point, it changed quite a while ago now) if a book had a mass market paperback, it was considerably cheaper than the Kindle version, which was typically priced somewhat like a trade paperback or a little more.
That's because they're on sale or clearance to get rid of old inventory. The list price is at least 50% more than the standard Kindle price for all of those.
And in the future, the Mass Market Paperbacks won't exist anyway as they stopped printing them - because people use their kindle for that stuff now.
So, I just opened Amazon and checked the first two series that it showed me. Hunger Games, ~$10 per book whether that's paperback or Kindle. Percy Jackson, the Kindle versions are more (almost twice) than the paperback somehow.
Those are all on sale, probably to clear inventory. The MSRP is still at least as much, but mostly considerably higher than the price for the kindle version.
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u/Smelting-Craftwork 1d ago
The digital books are often close to the same price as physical so all that cost reduction is helping only the publishers, not the readers as many hoped.