Comparison of ebook and ibook prices.



 

Price of Amazon’s Top 100 Bestsellers.

For the past couple of years, every now and then, I have checked the price of the top 100 selling ebooks on Amazon. Originally the top 100 included free ebooks, which quickly came to dominate the top 100, but about a year ago Amazon split the free ebooks into a separate top 100. Then the top 100 was dominated by very cheap ebooks priced from 99c to $2.99. But over 2012, more ebooks in mid-range prices of $3.99 to $4.99 began to appear on the list. But that trend seems to be reversing.

I checked the top 100 today and found: 35 ebooks priced at $2.99 or less, including 14 at 99c. The last time I had checked in September only six ebooks were priced at 99c, there were seven at that price in August and three in June. This is down from a massive 34 at 99c in February 2011.

Eleven ebooks were priced at $1.99, which I noted in September “had resurfaced as a frequent price in the best seller list, with eight ebooks at that price. The previous two times I had checked the number of ebooks priced at $1.99 was too insignificant to mention.

Ten were priced at the ebook guru price of $2.99, which is continuing its slow decline as a dominant price. In September there were 16, August 15, June 22, and in February 32 at that price.

This time around there were 11 ebooks at $3.99 which compares favourably to 14 last time. But the number priced at $4.99 dramatically dropped to only three, whereas in September there were nine and in August 11 at that price.

Thirty-eight ebooks were priced $7 or more this time, compared to 30 in September, 32 in August and 47 in June.

I commented last time that the mid-range of prices, $3.99 to $6.99, with 36 ebooks, seems to be becoming more popular. But this time there were only 23 in that price range.   
 
Price of Ibooks.

Since I have recently purchased an ipad, I am now a bit more interested in the price of ibooks. So today I looked at the top 100 bestselling ibooks for the first time. I found that in many ways their prices mirror Amazons.

Five ibooks were 99c. Fifteen were at the ebook guru price of $2.99. Overall 23 were priced at or under $2.99, compared to 35 of Amazons.

In the mid-range of $3.99 to $6.99 there were 29 ibooks as compared to 36 ebooks. Fifteen ibooks were priced at $3.99 and ten at $4.99.

Forty-six ibooks were priced over $7 as compared to 38 of Amazon’s ebooks.

So the range of prices on the Amazon and Apple top 100 best sellers, at least for today, are very similar, with Amazon’s being slightly cheaper. This surprised me as I expected Amazon’s ebooks to be much cheaper than Apple’s ibooks because of a perceived dominance of Amazon’s bestseller list by cheaper self-published books and because Apple had tried to give the publishers a better deal until recent court cases.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review of Jonathan Franzen's Purity.

Image
Although this blog is mainly about science fiction, I sometimes read pure literature just to see what the other side is up. Jonathon Franzen is one of my favourite non-genre authors and here is a review of Purity, which I just finished reading.   Purity is literature with a plot. The plot revolves around secrets with the two main secrets being Purity’s search for the identity of her father, and the cover-up of a murder. The novel follows four main characters: Purity, Andreas Wolf, Tom and Leila. Purity is a recent university graduate in search of journalism job. She was raised by a controlling, but loving, mother who always got her own way and would argue for hours about the most trivial matters. Andreas Wolf is modelled on Julian Assange, complete with his own version of Wikileaks. Wolf was raised in East Germany and was a reluctant escapee when the wall came down as East Germany was a seemingly perfect place to keep his secrets. Tom is the owner and editor of an invest...
Read more

Review of The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, by Richard Flanagan

Image
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is about a dying mother, Francie, and the efforts of her adult children to keep her alive, even though she wants to die. The children have lost the ability to communicate with each other, and are out to show they have the power, at least in the case of Anna and Terzo, to keep their mother alive. While Tommy, a failed artist who was looking after Francie, just acquiesces to the will of his other two siblings.  The novel is also about our dying planet, particularly from climate change, as animals go extinct We say we care, but do little to prevent the unfolding disaster. The novel is set in Tasmania while bushfires rage throughout that state and the rest of Australia.  Anna is the main protaganist, a successful architect, who rather than face her mother's pain, her crap relationship with her son, or the raging climate around her, retreats into social media. Frequently forwarding articles she has not read to her friends, showing how she avoids taki...
Read more

New Blog Look.

I have just updated the look of my blog. I am trying to create a consistent web presence online by ensuring that my blog, website and social media look the same and are connected.  This desire for a consistent web presence is a result of what I have learnt in my studies for a Bachelor or Arts (Internet Communications). I have just completed the first two subjects. One of the subjects, Web Communications, had us creating a new web presence, so I created a new blog on Wix, a new Facebook page, a new Twitter account, and joined Wattpad for the first time. As part of the assignment we were supposed to consistently style all the sites. The central node is here . The other subject was an Introduction to Internet Design. In that subject we had to create, from html and CSS code, a website. I choose to do one for author Graham Clements. For that website, I pretended that I had published four novels that are in reality only unpublished, and in need of redrafting, manuscripts. I am quite ...
Read more