Quote:
Originally Posted by wallcraft
The new pricing scheme is due to be released "in early March". This means that no one should be buying Macmillan ebooks today at list price because they are supposed to get much cheaper very soon. We will know for sure in March.
We do have one indication of what "over time" means. Macmillan suggested to Amazon that they could stick with the existing retail approach if they were willing to wait 7 months after the hardback release. This suggests that the price may go down after 7 months. If the price reduction is automatic and based on time since release, this may lead to fewer anomalies like paperbacks much cheaper than ebooks.
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The problem here is that the CURRENT pricing is what B&N sells the books for, which is a significant discount over the list price. The new contract terms eliminate any such sales or discounts. The list price will be the price the item is sold at, period.
Macmillan didn't set those prices randomly. They believe that's the value of the product. And that's why Macmillan thinks $15 is such a great deal, because it's such a huge discount over what the old list price was.
But it's still far above what retailers have been selling the ebooks for.
You're making a lot of assumptions about how and when Macmillan will lower the price of the ebooks. I'm pointing to existing evidence of Macmillan's current ebook pricing, even for titles that have been on the market for a decade, and saying that that evidence strongly suggests that Macmillan is not in the habit of lowering ebook pricing based on the age of a title.
I can't find the link at the moment, but there is a copy of the actual contract macmillan presented to Amazon out there. In it, there is nothing stating the timetable for price reduction, if it exists at all. Right now, that price reduction is nothing but a blurb in a press release.