So Gollancz finally launched their SF Gateway site after having teased us for months. When they first announced it, I was cautiously optimistic about it. As long as it got the pricing and ease of purchase right and avoided relics from the pre-digital age like territorial restrictions, I could see myself spending a lot of money there. I’m a fairly recent convert to the e-book, liking the ease with which I can carry a small library on my phone, but I still rate physical books higher than their digital counterparts. There are only a few authors I buy in hardcover (Banks, MacLeod, Martin, Miéville, Pratchett, Stross and Walton), more I buy in paperback, but most I buy secondhand. E-books have to compete mainly with the last. They’re certainly not worth buying at hardcover prices and even standard mass market paperback prices is pushing it. Especially for backlisted books.
In short, the books available through the SF Gateway have to be as cheap as buying them secondhand would be. Most of which cost me in the region of two to four euros, being lucky enough to live in a city with loads of cheap, well stocked secondhand bookstores. I’m more than willing to pay roughly the same price or a little bit more for those books I can’t find there, but not much more.
Gollancz got one thing right, from the start offering a wide range of authors and books, but they got it wrong on the other aspects. The first is that you can’t buy the books directly from their site, but are directed to a selection of online booksellers like Amazon. Worse, there’s no pricing information there either. So if I want to buy Pat Cadigan’s Fools, I’m redirected to Amazon, where it costs $8.25. I’m also invited to buy it at Kobo (never heard of it), but that site doesn’t know this book at all!
I could just as well do a search on Amazon UK directly and find the books there, which brings me to the second flaw: the pricing. Here they got it almost right: many of these books are available for three pounds, but there are also quite a few more expensive than that, five pounds and up. Three quid is reasonable; five quid not so much. Annoyingly, most of the books I would like to get are on the expensive side.
Finally, as James Nicoll noted, there are territorial restrictions on these books, while the gender ratio of the authors is a bit skewed…
In conclusion: Gollancz’s experiment is a mixed success. It hasn’t really made it easier or cheaper for me to get these books, but I think I will get at least some of these books at some point. Unless I find them secondhand first of course.