Shane Spall's book about her and Tim Spall's Voyages with Princess Matilda (shown on BBC4 as All At Sea) is released tomorrow on Kindle priced at £8.59.

Yet you can buy the paperback, delivered free, from both Amazon and Waterstone's for £7.49.

How can that be? Surely the electronic version has no additional costs, whereas the paperback has to be printed, has a cost in paper and then transport costs from printer to warehouse, then from warehouse to end user.

Firstly, did you see this text on the product description?: "Unlike print books, digital books are subject to VAT."

Secondly, the book is new, and if you wait a short while (a few days or weeks) the price will likely come down, just as prices do in shops for e.g. records, DVDs etc.

Thirdly the difference in price between a "real" book and an ebook in terms of manufacture is around 20p, so ebooks aren't significantly cheaper at all.

Actually, no, I didn't realise that ebooks were subject to VAT. That's both Interesting and surprising. You learn something new everyday.

There's a 20% hike straight away.

I feel a campaign coming over me.


Supplementary - Is a Jaffa Cake a biscuit?

Really can't see that being true. Where did you get that information from.

I'm pretty sure that the cost of a book the actual printing costs is usually between 10-15% of the total. Obviously this cost isn't incurred with an e-book, the equivalent storage cost and distribtution cost of the file would be miniscule in comparison.

By the way I'm not arguing about the prices being similar for print and e-books, as all the other costs are the same (royalties, distributers etc..) so when you add the VAT (which is wrong and should be removed from e-books) it works out similar if not more.

My publisher, plus several articles I've read on the subject.


Think about it... For a copy of a book the paper, ink and transportation - for a single copy - works out at about 20p - 50p, certainly much less than £1. The remaining costs of the book cover marketing, promotion, advances / payments to the publisher, the author and the retailer, and distribution.

Ah, you'll say - an ebook costs nothing to distribute! So who pays for the servers that store them, the storage space on the servers, the premises, their security, their staff, the network bandwidth, the power to drive the servers... and so on.

Without VAT that would cost around £7.16 which is 33p cheaper so I am curious would you still be miffed at the price or happy to pay at that price then?

It's obviously a cake otherwise it would be called a Jaffa Biscuit

It's a cake. Cakes go hard when they go stale, biscuits go soft. Jaffa cakes go hard when they are stale, so they are a cake.

That's pretty much what I said in my post anyway.

However the cost of servers and server maintance etc.. would be tiny in comparison to physical book costs. You could store the entirety of for example Amazons digital books on probably less than 2TB of disc space (you'd get a million books 2mb in size anyway which is probably way overestimating the size of most books and over estimating the number of available e-books on amazon). The cost of servers that size with multiple off site backups is nothing compared to the costs of physically making/transporting real paper books.

The retailer obviously pays for these costs. The retailers have I would have thought significantly more costs with selling paper books. Rents for shops, warehouses, security, staff and the running costs of all of that

I didn't realise the VAT element (my error - if I'd read further.........). However as it is a "print" medium. I'm miffed at the cost of VAT. Other costs seem to make sense - I have to take Nasalhair's word for it.


Which is why, although it looks like a biscuit - is a cake and doesn't carry the luxury tax. I love the fact this is the debate that won the case.

i could go on about carrots being fruit - but don't want to derail my own thread, there is some interesting information being presented, which being a) old and b) very new to this whole eBook thing I didn't realise.

It could also be because digital books are more of a niche market that printed books and therefore incure a premium.

Maybe this will be something that will change in the future.

I didn't like the idea of paying for a download at first (never use iTunes/Amazon etc apart from for the odd song) but then I realised £3/£4 for a book you might read over a few days is better value than fast food (for example) which is a similar price and takes minutes to eat. So now I happily pay for books, my limit is £6/£7 though. I hate seeing 'price set by publisher' though, and they wonder why people look 'elsewhere' to get their books.

For novels and anything mainstream I think that kind of price point is fine.

But what about more niche, non-main-stream, non-fiction type titles? They often need to be sold at a higher cost to recover costs as they will sell a lot less due to what they are about.

It is something to do with ebooks being classed as software. This is how I think the VAT is justified. There are many petitions to have it removed but don't know how likely it is.

France and Luxembourg have lower VAT rates for ebooks than their main VAT rate so there is no reason to believe the same couldn't happen here.

However as Kindle books are sold by "Amazon Media EU S.à r.l." which is based in Luxembourg we should be getting charged just 3% VAT

There's an epetition on the government website. In order to get it heard in Parliament it needs in excess of 100,000 signatures. Right now, it has just under 5,000.

Spread the word via Facebook, Twitter etc:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/114

It's got 4995 signatures so far so just added mine too.

Now 5027

It's a cake unless you want a 20% VAT increase!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_Cakes


Given the Amazon etc are falling over backwards to sell us eraders you would expect them to do someting with the price even if in the short term,
Its not just the price of printing the paper books but the cost of storage & distribution etc, also don't for get the cost to publishers when the latest flop appears in The Word for £2.99

Price of ebooks is a con, they are milking the market for every penny that they can, then they wonder why some people buy DVD's full of books from ebay.

I was shocked at the price of ebooks until I realised that I am working on the assumption that because it is not a physical item and I cannot hold it on my hands then it is worth a lot less. However the content is the same so surely the author and publishers should get paid the same. There is an assumption both with music and books that because something is in a non physical and digital format then it should be free or sold for next to nothing. My only complaint is that you do not have the option of buying digital files second hand or buying/selling on ebay. I always buy second hand stuff.

ref #8
I like stale fig biscuits, nice and crunchy,does this make them into cakes ?
cheers
billyboy10

I never knew eBooks got VAT on them. Sucks....

Petition at 5045 now.

Why should books not have VAT on them?

It appears that ebooks have a way to go before VAt is lifted.

"Under EU law, VAT on electronic books must be charged at the standard rate. A reduced rate cannot be applied to digital or electronic supplies, or supplies of text via the internet, as they are classed as supplies of services rather than physical goods. There is therefore no scope in the principal VAT directive to apply a reduced rate on e-books."

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/uk...-book-vat.html