Browsing the internet looking for something to write about and I happened upon this article, you need to read it before going much further here as I any summary leaves out many of the salient points. Just in case you haven’t clicked through the articles goes a bit like this:

Stop asking to receive apps for free as the author has put a lot of work into it and the pittance you pay doesn’t even begin to cover the cost. It includes this letter:

Dear Therapist

I am the parent of a child who cannot speak and really needs help. I saw that you offer therapy services to people like my child and I’d love to have access to them. However, I am really surprised that your therapy services are so expensive and think that you should provide them free of charge. Other people provide free therapy services and there are also many people who are not therapists who provide free therapy services in their spare time.

I’d be happy to provide a recommendation of your therapy services to other people if you were to provide them to me for free. Otherwise, I am afraid I will just have to blog about how expensive your therapy services are and go somewhere else. It seems so sad that children in desperate need of help are denied access to therapy services because of people wanting to make a profit from their disability.

and then includes it again replacing ‘therapy’ with ‘app’. I’m not making light of their thoughts as they’re entirely correct and I’m totally guilty of mouthing off at the price of an app but I’m truly grateful I didn’t write a letter like that. What I’m suggesting is we take their letter and replace ‘therapy’ with ‘book’ or ‘ebook’.

A book (print or digital) can take time to write. A friend has just spent six months of his life writing his first book and now needs to have it edited before sending it to agents, you can have a look at his Kickstarter campaign and contribute if you choose. That’s six months where he ignored family and friends, left his email to its own devices on so many occasions and basically hibernated. Six months when he could have been doing something else. In Australia a paperback is generally priced at around $20. So, the author has spent six months writing his book and you buy it for $20, if you do some maths that works out at a stupid number of dollars per hour, sorry, I meant cents per hour. It means you really need to sell thousands or millions of copies to make any decent kind of dollar amount per hour. That totally ignores the amount paid to the bookshop, publisher, editor, agent etc. So when you sell a book at $20 you’re only getting a fraction of that.

I’m not going to look at the US where books cost so much less or the UK where they also cost less. I could look at New Zealand where they cost more but I’m not convinced the author gets more money for their time.

I just wonder what value we’re putting on the author’s time when we spend such a small amount on a book.