Quote:
Originally Posted by carld
For me the outrage comes from publishers charging more for a product when demand ISN'T high. I was interested in Swan Song by Robert McCammon. Simon and Schuster wants $13.99 for the Kindle edition of a hardcover published in 1989.
The book is #7,853 in the Kindle Store, and #4,590 in Books. That's not bad, but I don't see any justification for such a high price for an old book.
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devil's advocate:
it kind of makes business sense. for one thing, it is reasonable for publishers to assume that e-reader users are relatively more "affluent" and have more disposable income to spend on "gizmos." Therefore if I were the management, why wouldn't I charge more for a e-book, even the cost of producing it is less? Same logic applies to why high-end hotels are charging $10 for a bottle of water - the people who go there just have more money to spend.
And if the publisher is not 100% committed to ebooks, and still think that pbooks are the bread and butter they intend to keep, there is even less incentive for them to offer discount on ebooks in order to push the market. I could imagine during management meeting, there is a possible discussion along the line "OK, it seems that this ebook wave is unavoidable, but we have this pbooks model so deeply ingrained in our business, so we will dip into the ebook territory to avoid becoming dinosaurs but we will charge a premium and see how far we could push it."
As a user, obviously i like to see lower prices, but such publisher mentality (if true) is not totally unreasonable from a business standpoint.