09-05-2011, 02:40 PM | #31 |
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My book buying rules, and these are hard rules that I will never break:
1) No books over $8, paperback or electronic doesn't matter; 2) Electronic can not cost more then the printed editions; I will never buy an electronic when it costs more then the printed one; Don't care who wrote it or how good or bad I simply will not abandon these rules. This is where I differ with Becca Ann - doesn't matter before or after agency pricing, favorite authors or not makes little difference, no books over $8. I am not interested in paying more for books, however I will gladly pay less and amazon allows me to do exactly that, Last edited by jbcohen; 09-05-2011 at 02:42 PM. |
09-05-2011, 03:24 PM | #32 | |
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I'm willing to pay more for reference works that I'll keep using. |
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09-05-2011, 03:25 PM | #33 | |
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09-05-2011, 04:15 PM | #34 | |
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Hey, there should be a sticky for " people who want to complain about agency pricing" . Every three days or so , someone pops up with pretty much the exact same statement.
Mike Shatzkin says the following: Quote:
I think it comes down to just that. For the average consumer, the current price model (14.99 for the e-book version of a new release, 12.99 for a new release that becomes a bestseller) is a great deal . They think of that as half price- all for something that they can buy in their pajamas, without burning $3.50 per gallon gas to go to the B&M store. Sure, DRM blah, blah, blah, but for the average consumer, that stuff doesn't register. While the average consumer thinks that these are good prices, that's what the publishers will charge. Indie authors can earn themselves a place at the table by competing on price ( and earn brownie points with the tech community by loudly proclaiming their opposition to big publisher "price fixing"). But the price for ebooks will be what the market can bear , not what techies THINK the "right price" should be. Eventually, the prices of books will drift down over time as the print book infrastructure goes away.But that will be in 5/10 years. For right now, it is what it is. Last edited by stonetools; 09-05-2011 at 04:17 PM. |
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09-05-2011, 04:45 PM | #35 |
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It's never going to change if we sweep it under the rug. I'd suggest that every time it comes up to email the evil members of the agency regime.
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09-05-2011, 05:00 PM | #36 | |
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I think the problem is that these 30/40/50 year old books don't exist in digital form and it's no cheaper to scan/proofread/typeset a 50 year old book than it is to do the same work for a newer book. A new book at least exists in a digital format already. (I assume so anyway - do publishers still accept type-written manuscripts?) Of course, in a lot of cases pubishers could just torrent those older books and cut out some of the work. I'd find an amusing bit of irony in that. Eventually the market and the scanning/proofing technology will meet and we'll be seeing dead-author bundles for reasonable prices. I hope. |
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09-05-2011, 05:59 PM | #37 | |||||
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Publishers are oblivious to a *huge* section of the market: the people who never bought new books. The entire used bookstore economy is invisible to them; they've got no idea what those people are willing to pay for ebooks, no idea how many potential customers have never been on their pie charts. A lot of those people are willing to buy ebooks--at the prices they'd pay for used pbooks. Those aren't losses; they're customers who otherwise don't exist. And whether those people stick to paper, or ebook freebies, or download from the darknet (and potentially become "criminals") isn't relevant to publishers--they are people who aren't buying now, who would be if someone were selling on their terms. Of course, the Agency 6 don't need to shift their practices for those customers. They can limit themselves to the pool of customers they understand, at the price range they're comfortable offering. Hundreds of other publishers and millions of individual authors are *leaping* for the chance to sell to them at a price they're happy to pay. Quote:
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I don't even think the current agency-pricing system & price range is unprofitable. I think it's unsustainable in the face of competition, because publishers who use it won't be content with the meager, slow profits it brings compared to more flexible strategies. |
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09-05-2011, 06:13 PM | #38 | |
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Storage space cost a lot more back then, and there were probably potential liability issues, and if the book was popular enough to reprint, it'd need to be reformatted anyway. (Storage wasn't too expensive if they thought to manage it. But you had to know that you'd want those files in 15 years to do that. And they'd be in, what, early Pagemaker format? Quark Xpress? Some awful proprietary postscript settings?) They no doubt mostly went through Microsoft Word at some point... but those versions weren't the final print-ready version, so they got deleted as soon as the proofreading on the ARC was done. Otherwise, though--yes. There's more awareness of profit potential for books from the 80's & 90's than books from the 50's, and they're the same amount of work to convert. What we're *really* missing is the nonfiction books; the market for those is much smaller, so they're not being converted much at all. The digital revolution is very much biased in favor of entertainment and against time-sensitive facts & opinions. |
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09-05-2011, 06:45 PM | #39 |
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Why do you think they will sell 50000 copies of all books sold for $0.50? The number sold of most old books that is re-published are much lower than that. And books is not a product with perfect plasticity.
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09-05-2011, 08:09 PM | #40 | |
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Naturally not every book is going to sell 50000 copies. But I'd be interested to see a market in 50 years where the demand isn't just based on the hype a particular book generates. If I were to walk into a B&M bookstore with at least one copy of every book ever printed, the last thing I'd be looking for is the latest Clancy or Dan Brown. |
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09-05-2011, 08:12 PM | #41 | |
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A lot of nonfiction has the added complexity of diagrams scattered throughout the text or sections of photographs, if you were to include those in the digital copies. I can see your point - I doubt anyone is jumping to convert those before the mass market fiction. |
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09-05-2011, 09:12 PM | #42 | |
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Many self-publishing authors have managed to sell 50,000 ebooks. Some have managed to sell a million or more. 20,000+ sales in one year--from a newbie with no other titles in print. 100,000 copies in a year, split between two authors. 42,000 copies in one month, also split; they've also acquired a publishing contract from Harper Collins. 1100 ebooks a day--more per day than Random House did in 6 months. He doesn't say he's broken 50k, but somehow, I don't think his sales are all going to happen in the space of two months. I can't find the blog post I saw last week, about a woman with a hope to sell 50k ebooks in a year--without actively attempting to seek sales until December. She's got the book in a few places for sale; it's just also available on several free sites like Feedbooks & Manybooks. It's August, and she's got ~34,000 sales so far, and 50k by the end of the year looks very feasible. I don't believe any author that a major publisher would sign on, couldn't sell 50,000 copies of that book on their own. That doesn't mean self-pub would absolutely be best for them; maybe they hate managing business. Maybe their internet access is sporadic at best. Maybe they really, *really* want to be in print with that logo on the spine. Maybe the publisher will arrange book signings, and even if the author has to pay for transportation, they *love* book signings & meeting fans. Maybe the advance is sweet, and they don't care that they're signing away 75% of the cover price for the life of the book. But any book that one of the Agency Six would print, should be able to sell 50k copies independently. Authors should sort out the maths themselves, and decide which platform is better for their careers. |
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09-05-2011, 09:48 PM | #43 | |
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09-05-2011, 09:54 PM | #44 | |
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09-05-2011, 10:54 PM | #45 | |
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I think, EM , you are right to distinguish between customers for used books and customers for new books. Where you are wrong is insisting that sellers of new books should compete for those customers by selling at new book prices. That makes about as much sense as saying that new car dealers should compete for used car customers by offering new cars at used car prices. Economically, the math just does not add up. You should understand that publishers are selling, for example, every copy of GRRM's latest that they can print at $18.81 hard cover and every e-book they can download at $14.99. They have been selling every copy of Unbroken in both formats at those "unsustainable " prices all year long. Maybe they aren't as clueless about prices as you think, because there is zero evidence that they are losing customers selling at those prices. Last edited by stonetools; 09-06-2011 at 04:27 AM. |
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