Insights from PWC’s report: pricing your book

A few days ago I came across a fascinating report regarding the future of e-Books and e-Readers by PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

The analysis itself is somewhat dated (2010) but the survey gave some interesting pointers for us, self-published authors. So I will be posting highlights from the report as I go through it.

Regarding pricing your book, the report offered some interesting points. Namely:

If the hardcopy edition is priced at 10$-14$, most readers (over 50% of respondents) would like the e-book version to be priced at a maximum price of 3.99$ (with many saying that they prefer 1.99$).
At that price (range of 1.99$ to 3.99$), most people would buy between 10 to 14 e-books per year.
If the price of an e-book is the same as the hardcopy, 53% of respondents said they would prefer the hardcopy edition. I can draw two conclusions from this; one, that people still like the touch and feel of paperback books, and two that the price does make a difference. The e-book seems intangible compared to the paperback, which is why people feel that the price should be much lower that the physical book.
50% of people read both e-books and paperbacks.
Finally, women aged between 30 and 65 are the premium target group for e-books, and the ones that will make the difference in terms of a book’s success, as they are the ones reading the most; usually several times per week.