Kindle owners like cheap eBooks. According to Amazon’s Top 100 Paid list, 7 of the Top 10 titles cost $5 or less.

The No. 1 title, Alone by Lisa Gardner is $.99, the No. 3 title is $.99 Switched (Trylle Trilogy, Book 1) by Amanda Hocking, and the No. 4 title is The Hangman’s Daughter by Oliver Pötzsch which costs $3.99, The No. 10 title is a $.99 Kindle game from Oak Systems Leisure Software called Word Search.

The most expensive books on the list include Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and… the No. 2 title, which costs $9.99; The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larsson $9,99 eBook, which is ranked at No. 5; and James Patterson’s Tick Tock, which costs $12.99 and is ranked at No. 8.

Three titles cost $5. This includes Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at No. 6 and The Girl Who Played with Fire at No. 7, as well as Water for Elephants: A Novel by
Sara Gruen at No. 9.

Authors and publishers do not tend to agree on what is a fair royalty rate for an eBook. Publishers have set the standard at about 25%, but according to a panel at Digital Book World agents and authors think it should be 50%.

The Author’s Guild has a blog post on its site this week called, “E-Book Royalty Math: The House Always Wins,” arguing how authors are losing money on their eBook deals. In the post, the Author’s Guild calculated the gross profit (income per copy minus expenses per copy) for three popular titles to argue their case. Here is what they came up with:

The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Author’s Standard Royalty: $3.75 hardcover; $2.28 e-book.
Author’s E-Loss = -39%
Publisher’s Margin: $4.75 hardcover; $6.32 e-book.
Publisher’s E-Gain = +33%

Hell’s Corner by David Baldacci
Author’s Standard Royalty: $4.20 hardcover; $2.63 e-book.
Author’s E-Loss = -37%
Publisher’s Margin: $5.80 hardcover; $7.37 e-book.
Publisher’s E-Gain = +27%

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
Author’s Standard Royalty: $4.05 hardcover; $3.38 e-book.
Author’s E-Loss = -17%
Publisher’s Margin: $5.45 hardcover; $9.62 e-book.
Publisher’s E-Gain = +77%

The New York Times Best Sellers lists for eBooks will launch online on February 11th and will be followed with a print publication in the Sunday February 13th issue.

James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge’s crime novel Tick Tock from Little, Brown, topped the fiction category as the No. 1 eBook Best Seller and the No. 1 combined print and eBook Best Seller.

Laura Hillenbrand’s WWII book called Unbroken from Random House is No. 1 on nonfiction list. This title also topped the combined print and eBook sellers list.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett, ranked higher in eBooks sales than eBook and print combined sales. The book is No. 8 on the eBook bestsellers list for fiction and No. 9 on the combined print and eBook Best Sellers list.

Other authors who made the top 10 lists include Stieg Larsson, John Grisham, and George W. Bush.

Time Magazine released its Top 10 book lists for 2010 and the good news for eBook fans is that ninety percent of the titles have an eBook edition.

The only picks that didn’t have an eBook edition were fiction titles Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon published by McPherson and Wilson by Daniel Clowes which is published by Drawn and Quarterly. Hopefully these rankings and Gordon’s success at The National Book Awards will encourage the publishers to make digital copies available. Read more