Readers need to have some guarantee that this format wil be available for reading 20 years from now. Does that imply that there can never be proprietary formats? I don’t know.

http://safari.oreilly.com/9780137144488

They’re charging the same price for the print version as the PDF…and even selling both editions in a bundle.

Now, I’m not sure what I think about that model. It feels way too much like the RIAA’s stance on formats (i.e., you pay for the physical artifact & you should also pay for the mp3 encoding).

As a fiction writer, I understand clearly that digital rights and print rights are separate, but as a reader, I feel like I’m buying the *story* rather than a format. Charge me for the story, then give me all the formats I want for free. Again, Baen made the right choice here, in my opinion, when they started including promotional CD’s with digital text with their hardcover editions.

Or, they are starting high with their pricing so that a few months later they can start “cutting prices” and make readers believe that they are getting a much better deal. On the flipside, if they start out low they don’t have as big of a profit margin.

Come to think of it, O’Reilly is already doing this, and their price point isn’t what I would call low.

And given that I dropped $250 on one text last time I bought a college textbook, it isn’t like seemingly outrageous price points for highly specialized texts is something new.

Deep down, I’m pretty sure that the folks at Random House aren’t idiots. There has to be a great deal more to this program than the micro-article Reuters reported is telling us.

(And maybe it’s just me, but $10 for a non-specialized ebook *still* feels too high. I think we’d see more buy in and better distribution mechanisms at the $5 level. But as I’ve said previously on this blog, I don’t buy ebooks for casual reading…which is why I won’t charge for them, either.)

Random House’s strategy has been to maximize profit and then do heavy discounts later. Unfortunately, that idea (which works with print books and physical bookstores) doesn’t translate well to ebooks and online content. I expect ebook prices to settle at a fairly low price point (maybe $10) and then never be discounted.

That said, i can think of reasons why some kinds of books would command premium kind of prices. In the high tech industry, having access to latest information about technology improves your market value. And Random House is pretty good at picking authors who are likely to arouse strong interest. Like (ahem,) Ann Coulter.