Earlier in the year, John Sarkar and Kim Arora reported in the Times of India that ebooks were yet to take off in terms of sales. They also highlighted an issue across India, of some online stores listing ebook and print versions of the same book with little difference in price between the two formats. It is true that ebooks are still at an early stage in India.
However, online retail stores have been selling ebooks in India for some time now. Flipkart started doing so in 2012 and Infibeam even before this. As someone who has been listing my own ebooks for sale in India since 2012, I’m still a little frustrated to see the price of ebooks being similar to print versions being an issue; both from the perspective of authors and the impact this could be having on potential readers. If the price of ebooks is proportionate with print versions, then there are authors out there who are missing out on sales revenue. Of course, if an author is traditionally published with the backing of a publisher, the amount he/she will earn from ebooks sales will be fairly low. This is due to retail prices being governed by publishers and the deals they have with retailers.
However, it can be argued that any sales of digital versions of books for an author are better than none. Of course, as a self-published author, one can inform retailers what price they want to list their ebooks for. By having this control, authors can keep the prices low enough, in order to be able to entice readers to not just click digital thumbnails of ebooks, but to actually take the plunge and buy them.
Image credit: Daniel Sancho on flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]https://writingtipsoasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/hv1.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Hiten Vyas is the Founder and Managing Editor of eBooks India. He is also a prolific eBook writer with over 25 titles to his name.[/author_info] [/author]