The value of something

‘Every article on electronic books must ritually address the concept of book and the relation of form to book.’ – Joe Clark

How do we ascribe value to a book?

In Australia, in familiar market value terms, the average hardback – Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs, for example – costs around $49.95. These days however, hardbacks are a rarity so more general new paperbacks, like Bob Franklin’s Under stones, would cost closer to $24.95.

Then there are the variances in market audiences. A copy of Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels as an adult fiction release costs $32.95, while the newly released YA paperback would cost $19.99, which is at the higher end of YA pricing.

Books do fluctuate in price and are subject to many factors including purchase locations (city vs rural, interstate, airports), genres (children’s, crime fiction, technical manuals) and whether they were purchased from an online bookstore like Amazon or Bookworm.

So how much should a book cost? This is difficult territory, considering the way the current electronic vs print debate is unfolding, because it can depend on:

• genre
• purpose
• print run
• additional inclusions (photos, illustrations, colour pages)
• materials
• publishing costs (editing, administration, marketing, distribution)

And this is only the monetary value. My room is overflowing with books and journals on shelves, beneath desks, stacked in mountain ranges around the room. I enjoy waking up to them, grabbing one and flicking through to locate a passage caught in my memory. I value sharing these books with guests, to support an idea or reveal something momentous about life and literature.

Whether this is fetishistic is unimportant because books are interactive objects ‘made to be held’. One of my favourite books – leant to so many other readers – is Drown by Junot Diaz. The value attached to this book – the words, the rhythm, the excitement when I flick through pages and catch stray words, the way this well-shared book feels when I hold it – is incalculable.

If I lost this book or, for some incomprehensible reason, sold it, I could buy another copy. But my current relationship with Drown would cease to exist and the value I’d bestowed on the original could not be transferred to the new version.

So is a book merely ‘words bound together’? James Bridle, experimental publisher and eRevolutionary, said in an interview at The Book Oven, ‘The essence of the book has always been not that it is made of paper, but that you can hold it in your hand. It is wieldable – a very different thing to reading on a computer monitor.’

The Kindle Review, a website for all things Kindle and ebook related, defines an ebook as a work that is ‘90 per cent text’ or an ‘electronic version of a physical book’ that already exists.

What is the market value of an ebook? A Kindle ebook in Australia costs $13.50 – a flat fee. The ongoing feud between Amazon Kindle and Apple iBooks is, at its heart, about Amazon’s fixed-price business model.

When weighing in on the Amazon vs MacMillan (who were in talks with Apple iBooks at the time) brawl, Scott Westerfeld argued:

This becomes a selling point for Kindle, as new hardback books can cost up to $27. In some cases, Amazon is actually paying the publisher *more* than $9.99 per copy sold, and losing money. But Amazon has stacks of cash, and it's a way to sell more Kindles and gain market share.

It is strange, the way we currently evaluate the worth of ebooks. It’s as though they don’t have the same value as a printed book because they don’t exist as unique, ‘made to be held’ objects. Ebooks from publishing houses have gone through a similar editing and publishing process to their print counterparts. True, a continuing criticism of ebooks has been the lack of technical exactitude in the final product, but is this because publishing houses haven’t given enough resources to this undefined frontier?

In his article Web Standards for E-books, Joe Clark dissects the problems inherent in this reasoning:

Another way of saying this is that books should be as bookish as possible under the circumstances. Printed books need to take advantage of everything print has to offer (resolution, tactility, portability, collectability), while electronic books must do likewise for their own form (economy, copyability, reflow, searching and indexing, interlinking).

Now there’s a cottage industry selling conversion services for E-texts. One competitor in the E-book “space,” Kobo (né Shortcovers), promises conversions for “as little as $29... per title.” Another competitor, eBook Architects, converts (“to Mobipocket/Kindle first”) for about $400 in typical cases. The New York Times estimated that to “convert the text to a digital file, typeset it in digital form and copy-edit it” costs a mere 50¢.

Fees this low are unsustainably low and cannot possibly lead to good markup and clean copy.

Part of Macmillan’s concern is that ebooks are being devalued, and that this will be a continuing trend. How much exactly should the labour and expertise that goes into producing a book – electronic or print – cost? Because it appears the main place that publishing houses are saving money on ebooks is on the printing.

So the question becomes, what do I, as an individual, value in a book? Is it the ability to take every book I own on that long-desired trek across the Andes? Or is it the ability to share writings and ideas with members of my community, an impossibility for the Kindle, as demonstrated below:

(Actually, Barnes & Noble took this loss into consideration when developing their nook, which has a ‘lend ebooks to friends’ feature, allowing readers to loan books for a two-week period.)

Where do readers feel they should place the value of an electronic book arriving to them? Is it the human infrastructure that should be taken into consideration – the writing, editing, proofreading, building computers, transferring data, converting text, and/or constructing the ebook reader? How much should the author, editor or publisher receive for their book?

If readers can’t see all the processes and labour that went into the product, how can they estimate a set value for the book in the electronic form?

This is a circuitous way of arriving at the original question: how do we, as readers and booklovers, ascribe value to a book? True, the value and attachment we form with the Kindle, or any electronic reader, will differ to our paper books, but aren’t they still ‘words bound together’?