By Edward Nawotka
In today’s feature story Sergey Anuriev, CEO of Litres.ru, notes that part of the reason his company keeps prices for e-books as low is they do is in order to give his company an opportunity to compete with pirates. He noted that when the company began, e-book prices were at at 15% of print costs, but have slowly escalated, with the eventual goal of pricing e-books at 75% to 100% of the print price.
The implication is that low prices are a gateway to wean customers away from “free” content — or pirated content — to “paid-for” books.
US-based publishers have aggressively used services like Attributor to combat piracy; in other, less wealthy markets where publishers don’t have access to these costly policing services, fear of piracy has left publishers reticent to adopt digital publishing.
Will Litres.ru’s strategy work? Is is particular to Russia or could it be implemented elsewhere in the world?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
6 Comments
It certainly can work. But if you want to keep running a business, selling your content for a very low price isn’t something you can keep up with in the long run. I believe more in offering a very good service, for (of course) a good price (but higher then a third), without consumer-irritating additions (DRM, bad user interface in the web shop, etc.) and usable on any device the consumers wants. Also see this piece on ‘fighting’ piracy: http://www.geekwire.com/2011/experiments-video-game-economics-valves-gabe-newell, which states: ‘Piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue.’
The only way to combat piracy is through convenience and price.
Anything else either just antagonizes the legal customers (DRM) and doesn’t work anyway, or is like playing whack-a-mole (takedown notices).
I don’t know if Litres’ policy will be implemented in any country where (like across Europe) publishers are desperately trying to protect paper sales, but the reason they are turning the tide is because (a) they are offering e-books (piracy first flourishes when you don’t) and (b) they are cheap.
Convenience and price. It’s simple.
I agree with David. Convenience combined with price which is low enough, will make people think twice: it is worth pirating this book?
Litres.ru strategy will work, in my opinion.
http://ebookfriendly.com/2011/10/29/opinion-pirating-0-99-ebooks/
bullshit
people are stealing not because of price is too high, low price will not prevent piracy, but kill business
Convenience plus price can make a killer combo.
There are some analogies to be made with iTunes, which worked for me from Day One because of the convenience, a fair per-track price, and – importantly – freeing me from buying tracks I didn’t want.
Where books are concerned a instant no-cost taster, followed by a well-priced product is a tempting proposition. It’s up to you and your spreadsheet to determine breakeven.
Sorry, but nothing can beat free. People who don’t want to pay anything for the book will not buy the book. It does not matter how good or how convenient it is. So pricing to try to attract sales is not a good option. Go ahead and raise your prices to a reasonable level and never engage in book giveaways. Freebie lovers will wait until the book is free before they buy, so you will do nothing but lose money for your hard work.