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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
See my earlier comments about elasticity and total demand for any product, and my comments above about contracts.
Hardback, trade, and mass market do differentiate on price, but I don't believe they work the way you seem to think. Each will have a separate budget. Hardcover and trade paper editions generally get released about the same time. Mass Market editions are delayed. Most books don't get hardcover or trade editions, and are only issued as mass market. "Sale" books aren't a factor.
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Huh? Sale books prove that demand is elastic. How are they not a factor?
Hardback, trade, paperback, sale, bargain bookshop, second hand bookshop, charity bookshop, library sale, library. Books are available in many ways, at decreasing prices as they pass through their sales lifecycle. At each stage they pickup more readers.
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Publishing doesn't work that way. In the US, publishing has historically operated on a 100% returns model. If a book doesn't sell, the retailer can return any unsold copies for credit. In practice, hardcovers are actually returned. Paperbacks have the covers stripped off, and the bodies of the books are trash (though all too often, they wind up getting sold on the gray market for a tiny fraction of the original price.)
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None of this applies to eBooks.
Publishers need to adapt or die.
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Sales happen when publishers clear out unsold copies of hardcovers in the warehouse at a fraction of the cover price to make room for new stock. This usually happens when the mass market PB edition is released. The publisher decides the hardcover has sold as many copies as it's going to.
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...at the original price, but will sell more at the lower sale price. Sort of my point, really.
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The fact that retailers can simply return unsold copies for credit accounts for the "reserve against returns" numbers in book budgets, and has been a source of agony for the industry for as long as I've been paying attention. We are finally seeing experiments where publishers are offering retailers higher discounts, in exchange for limits on the amount that can be returned and acceptance of risk by the retailer when ordering because they won't simply be able to return the books if they guess wrong on what they can sell.
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Again, simply doesn't apply. eBooks are only 'printed' when they are sold, the concept of returns doesn't exist.