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Originally Posted by murraypaul
Huh? Sale books prove that demand is elastic. How are they not a factor?
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Easy. They don't make money for the publisher.
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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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Yep. But if I'm a publisher, my concern is sales that will actually make me money. Books resold on the secondary market don't generate revenue for
me.
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None of this applies to eBooks.
Publishers need to adapt or die.
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They are attempting to. The publishers are all asking "How can we make money selling ebooks?" The first part of any answer to that question will be "How do we price them?" The asking price must be enough to cover costs and generate a return.
Pricing that drops over time may help, but ultimately, any book will have a maximum total market. How big that market will be will depend upon the book. And buyers have demonstrated that they will wait in many cases for the price to drop and be able to get the book cheaper. What happens if the majority of people interested in reading a book
do wait for the price to drop to the lowest level? If I'm the publisher, what I'll see is a loss on the title, as the lowest price will be one at which I can't make money.
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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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How
much more? See my earlier comments about elasticity of demand. I think you are assuming far more potential readers for any given title than I am. You mentioned buying several Steig Larsson titles because you could get them cheap. Larsson has become an international bestseller, and there will be more elasticity of demand simply because more people have heard of him, and might "take a flyer" as you did, if they can get the books cheap enough. Most authors aren't in that happy place, and most titles won't have that sort of elasticity of demand.
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Again, simply doesn't apply. eBooks are only 'printed' when they are sold, the concept of returns doesn't exist.
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I never said it did. I was talking about the assumptions made when generating a budget for a book. If you are issuing print as well as electronic editions, returns are a factor, and reserve against returns becomes an element in the book budget. If you are issuing
only an electronic edition, you don't have returns, but you still have all of the other costs involved in producing a book.
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Dennis