[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by mrscoach

You are assuming the publishers got LESS from Amazon for the Kindle version of the books than they did the HB version.

Yes.

If that is the case then I can see your point, but I don't believe this is so. I could be wrong. Amazon pays contracted price per Kindle version sold, no matter how much Amazon sells to the public for.

And that contracted price is?

The standard discount to a retailer like Amazon from a publisher is probably around 60%. A hardcover with a $30 list price will cost Amazon $12. Like other retailers, they can choose to accept less margin on the book to boost sales. Some brick and mortar retailers might treat a really popular title as a "loss leader", and sell it for less than they paid for it, with the goal of attracting customers to the store and selling them other things once they got there.

You might not be willing to believe Amazon gives the publisher less on a Kindle edition than on a corresponding hardcover. I'm not willing to believe they they are making no money or taking a loss on Kindle sales.

If the publishers were getting as much from the Kindle sale as the hardcover sale, I don't think they would have felt the need to impose the Agency Pricing model.

Yes, the publishers ARE being greedy, when they could lower the price a little and sell MORE books.

You are assuming price is a dominant factor. Is it really?

Remember, books compete for the reader's discretionary time. There are any number of other things the reader could be doing instead of reading a book. Why read a book when you can watch TV?

While I certainly won't complain if I can get books cheaper, the limit here isn't the money required to buy them - it's the time available to read them once I have. I tell people one advantage to ebooks is that you don't have to call the paramedics if my unread stack topples over on me.

Then, once the pbooks come out lower the electronic price even more. But they don't want to do that. They want to whine and moan that making electronic versions is SO much work, and they can't make any money on them.

There is a cost to making ebooks, though publisher's comments on them tend to heavily overstate the case. The bigger problem is that most of the costs of a book are incurred before it ever reaches the stage of being issued, as a paper book or an ebook. Those costs will be there regardless, and will set lower limits on how cheap a book can be.

If the publishing industry was in trouble before then maybe they need to look at their practices, and maybe see electgronic publishing as a savior. Remember, insanity is doing what you have always done and expecting to get different results. Publishing is trying to get different results by using the same tactics, when the market has clearly changed.

They are being forced to reexamine their practices. But while ebooks are an opportunity, they are also a danger.

The fundamental question from our point of view is probably "Can publishers survive selling ebooks at the sort of prices a lot of folks here would like to see?" From what I can tell, the answer is "No. They can't."

Ultimately, you get what you're willing to pay for. If you aren't willing to pay what it costs to produce something, and make some money for the producers, it won't be made.
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Dennis