French eBooks

[tarvos]

Deepak Chopra

Definitely dreck.

[Arnaud]

Does anyone else find that French ebooks are incredibly expensive?

Yes, that's why the ebooks market represents less that 10% of the total sells of books in France and finally people prefer to buy paper/pocket books or download ebooks on illegal sites rather than being scammed.
Bragelone is an editor who publishes cheap ebooks, if you need more quantity than quality...

[aabram]

Does anyone else find that French ebooks are incredibly expensive? I don't normally pay more than a maximum of £3 for English language books (and mostly I find free options), whereas when I've looked recently for French books they've all been around £7.

What sort fo books are you reading then? My Amazon ebooks (in English) are always 6+€, often 8-10€ save for occasional sales in 3-5€ range and I don't do much contemporary fiction which is even costlier, mainly SF and science nowadays.

[emk]

Does anyone else find that French ebooks are incredibly expensive? I don't normally pay more than a maximum of £3 for English language books (and mostly I find free options), whereas when I've looked recently for French books they've all been around £7.

£7 is typical for French language books of any kind, I'm sad to say. The French book market is smaller than the English book market, and so each copy apparently needs to cost more to for the author to make the same money. On top of that, books in France are rarely discounted at retail—as far as I can tell, the publishers set the prices, not the bookstores. (The good news is that French has a vigorous and interesting literary scene, so there's stuff worth reading in many genres.

Realistically, with a bit of luck, I might be able to buy contemporary French paperbacks for about US$10 if I look around. But I rarely count on that, and I usually wind up paying extra for shipping. Or I can buy books in Montreal, but that's often more expensive than shipping a stack of books from Amazon.fr.

The good news is that I can at least 2x to 3x as many hours of entertainment per book, because even at my fastest, I couldn't read more than 40 pages of French per hour!

A miracle has occurred! After seven irritating years, Amazon is now selling contemporary, mainstream French ebooks -- the stuff you want to read, not just self-published dreck. I am thrilled.

Other dreck self-publishers:

...

Personally, I say long live the dreck.

Clearly, rdearman, you have not been shopping for French-language Kindle books on the US amazon.com site. "Dreck" is absolutely the correct word here. We're talking bad self-help books for businessmen, third-rate bodice rippers, and some of the worst science fiction I have read in my life. Basically, contemporary French-language books for US Kindles have been utterly disappointing up until now. There's been virtually nothing worth the extra work of reading in my L2. In fact, I wouldn't read any of it in my L1 unless I was utterly bored out of my mind in a log cabin and it was the only book available.

I have no idea how self-publishing in modern France compares to self-publishing in English-speaking markets. Ebooks arrived many years later in France than they did in the US, and the market barely existed a couple of years ago. But US Kindles have been a wasteland of horror and despair.