04-19-2010, 04:52 AM | #16 | |
Hibernian eBook Warrior
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What we have to remember though is that this is a new market for publishers and readers alike. Publishers are terrified of damaging their main products - paper/hard backs. Remember that for the average publisher, eBooks account for less that 5% of sales, so there is no great pressure there to reduce prices - yet. In time, prices will come down as publishers figure out how to maximise the potential of eBooks as they become a larger part of their producion and sales processes. Its not much fun waiting, but we will have to for a while. Hopefully all the new players in the retail sector will fight against each other on price in the coming months, despite any agreements with publishers. |
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04-19-2010, 05:57 PM | #17 | |
Curmudgeon
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Let's say, pulling numbers out of thin air, that they can sell a physical book for $10 retail, and get a net $2 profit from it, or sell an ebook for $6 retail and get a net $3 profit from it. Instead, they sell the ebook for $12, so to protect their sales of a format they're getting a lesser profit from. That's like refusing to sell hardcovers for fear they'll cut into paperback sales. The publishers doing this are harming themselves in several ways: The buyer who didn't buy the ebook isn't going to buy the HC instead; they're going to buy a different ebook from a competing publisher. So it's not just a lost ebook sale, it's a lost sale, and possibly a lost customer. There will be people who are sufficiently peeved by what they see as price gouging or corporate greed to distribute illicit copies of the book. Perhaps more important to the publisher, there are people who would have been legitimate buyers if the ebook had been reasonably priced, but now cross that ethical line and just go download the thing. After they've done it once, why not do it again? Their superposed ethical quantum states collapse, and what comes out is piracy. Goodwill is an important thing to a business. Companies go to great and expensive lengths to create it. It's obvious to everyone that a physical book, needing paper, ink, printing, packaging, warehousing, shipping, returns, and all of that, has to cost significantly more than a digital file. Even if they've never thought about this in terms of books, they feel it intuitively. They know the pictures they take with their digital cameras don't cost anything when they look at them on the computer screen or email to all of their relatives, only when they print them out. So when they see a format that costs the publisher essentially nothing to reproduce as many copies as necessary being sold for more than the price of a format that needs to be physically manufactured, they feel ripped off. This costs the publisher goodwill. Why are ebook sales only 5% of the market? Aside from poor quality, high prices, and DRM, I'd have to guess that a major reason is not enough people with the means to read them. People look at not just the price of the reader but the price of the books, and figure it's a better idea just to buy paper books, since they're getting more utility. Back in the mainframe days, a computer program cost more than a nice car; nowadays, when practically everyone owns at least one computer, economies of scale have dropped the prices to affordable, sometimes even trivial, levels. I remember games for the Apple II selling for $50 back around 1980-ish; that would be $132.06 today, according to the inflation calculator. Now you can get a new-release game for less than half of that, even a third of that, in constant dollars. And games haven't gotten any cheaper to make; on the contrary, a lot of those Apple games were written by two guys in six months, not two hundred guys in a couple of years. But the market has increased from a few thousand to many millions. Let's say someone buys an ebook reader for $300, and buys a book every month. Amortized over a period of five years, that ebook reader is costing them $5 a month -- that is, adding $5 to the price of the ebook. So even if the ebook was the same price as the pbook, that $5 has to be factored into it, too. For ordinary buyers (as opposed to us bookaholics) to decide that an ebook reader is worth buying, that equation has to change. Ebooks are the ultimate mass market, and publishers are cutting their own throats if they don't recognize this. The ones who figure out first are gonna eat their lunch. |
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04-20-2010, 06:50 AM | #18 | |||||||||
Hibernian eBook Warrior
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Again, as the industry settles down, eBooks will become more mainstream and popular. I think that will happen faster than we think when the time comes. Quote:
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04-20-2010, 01:00 PM | #19 |
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I went to the fair yesterday it was almost deserted plenty of book readers to see and it was a pleasure walking around without the crowds . I had a moan about the price of ebooks .
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04-20-2010, 01:01 PM | #20 |
Chocolate Grasshopper ...
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04-21-2010, 05:40 AM | #21 | |||||||
Curmudgeon
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You have a whole continuum, from people who would never dream of reading an illicit copy of an ebook to people who wouldn't buy a legitimate one at any price. The former are already yours, and the latter never will be. The contested territory is in the middle, where you have people teetering between the "good" and "bad" sides. The harder it is to buy a book legitimately, the higher the price:value ratio as seen by the buyer, and the more negatively they feel about the seller, the more likely that person is to tip over to the "bad" side, and probably stay there. Basically, publishers' own actions are pushing people who with a little effort could be long-term customers into becoming long-term pirates instead. That's not good for anyone. And the "more laws! harsher sentences! D-R-M! D-R-M!" approach will make things worse instead of better. Most people, given the chance, prefer to act in ways that let them see themselves as good. And when they do something wrong, or even questionable, they justify it to themselves in some way. "They treat their customers like dirt" is one of those ways, and "They make it way too hard/expensive/cumbersome to buy/use it legitimately" is another. Treating the customers worse and making it harder for them to buy or use a product does not, despite the publishing (and music) industry's thinking, build goodwill and encourage sales over piracy. Quote:
I don't want to read a book that plays videos at me, links to Web content, or, honestly, does anything else except lie there quietly on the page. I want the electronic equivalent of a mass market paperback, and sold at a price proportional to its cost to the publisher -- i.e., lower than the price of a paperback that must be printed, etc. If they want me to read new ebooks instead of Project Gutenberg, they need to sell them at a price proportional to what I'm actually getting. Which is, frankly, not a lot. Quote:
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