[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

To be more precise, the agency model does not allow retailers to hack n' slash prices at will, e.g. no specific retailer has a price advantage.

In short, retailers can't be retailers.

Retailers of T-shirts can "hack n' slash" the prices of their T-shirts. Retailers of desk chairs can "hack n' slash" the prices of their desk chairs. And, more germane to our discussion, retailers of pbooks can "hack n' slash" the prices of their pbooks. But you're cool with retailers being forbidden to do exactly the same thing with ebooks?

No, what people want is to pay next to nothing, as they curse at the people who are risking their money to get the work to the public in a presentable fashion.

Shill much?

That's not true, and you've been here long enough to know it's not true. That's not true of what people want, and it's not true of what people do. Trying to pretend otherwise is disingenuous at best.

Readers want the free market to control book pricing. For pbooks, it does; for ebooks, the cabal won't let it. I'm afraid I'm too much of a capitalist to think that centralized, single-point control of the book market is a good thing. And yes, many readers do think that temporary use of an electronic file over which they have no control and very few rights is worth less to them than permanent ownership of a physical book, and want to pay accordingly. This is somehow surprising?

No, it doesn't. It has a different set of abilities and restrictions than paper.

Like some people are "differently abled" because they can't walk?

If I were to buy a DRM-locked ebook, I couldn't read it on whichever reading device I wanted. I couldn't let my mother-in-law read it. I couldn't sell it to a used bookstore when I didn't want it anymore. I couldn't give it to the church sale or the charity book table or the library.

Yes, if I broke the DRM, I could do some of those things, though still far from all. But we're talking the legal and cabal-intended uses of the book, not what one could do otherwise. The only thing you listed that might be an advantage is sending it to some random location ... but I have more books than I have time to read loaded on my ebook reader already, so I feel no need to buy any additional ones at random times. If I buy a pbook that sucks, at the very least I can give it to some relative who might like it, and earn a few brownie points that might some day turn into them giving me a better book. With an ebook, I can't even do that.

Because in a medium where supply is essentially unlimited, you're paying based on demand, value, industry norms and the like. Cost merely sets the ground floor for the price.

You're forgetting one other critical thing that sets that price: what the buyer is willing to pay. "Industry norms" are only meaningful to the industry (and its shills); buyer acceptance is meaningful to the buyers, and there are a lot of buyers. A while lot of buyers. If they won't pay ... well, those "norms" don't do jack for someone who can't sell their products. Buyer acceptance can drive demand through the floor, and despite the cabal's insistence that buyers have to be "trained" to accept $15 as the minimum price for an ebook, it's just not happening.

If the publisher is making $10 from the $25 hardcover, and $3 from the $10 ebook, they need to sell 3.3 times as many copies just to break even.

Except that the publisher isn't making $10 from the $25 hardcover.

Just for starters, the distributors (or the big chain stores the publishers sell direct to) get a minimum 50% discount. So that's $12.50 (at least) down the drain right there. Then there's the price of printing those books, shipping them hither and yon, and eventually having them hauled to the recycler. Remember, too, the fact that 1 out of 2 (or more) books will be returned, unsold, to the publisher, to be remaindered for a buck apiece or just plain junked if even the remainder stores don't want them. So when you factor in discounts, the cost of goods sold, returns, and so on, that publisher might be getting only a few dollars for that hardcover, with a small percentage of that going to the author. (if we believe Slate's figures, the publisher may be getting as little as a dollar when all is said and done)

If they make $3 from a $10 epub, the possibility exists, quite strongly, that the publisher and the author are pulling in more money, not less, from that book.

Remember one thing about people who buy books: Those of us who buy them by the armload, like MobileRead members, are in the minority. Books are our primary recreation. For most people, on the other hand, they're distinctly secondary. They weigh the purchase of a book against many other forms of entertainment, such as buying movie tickets, a DVD, a video game, or just chilling out on the couch and watching TV. For MR members, we buy books at the expense of other books (if I buy Book A, I won't have that time to read Book B). Our book purchase are constrained by our available time. For average people, their book purchases are constrained by their available budget -- if a book is cheaper than the alternatives, they're more likely to buy the book. Cut your $25 book to $10, and you may very well sell 2.5x as many of them. If the profit is exactly the same as it is with a pbook, but you're selling two and a half times as many, you're not just going to win, you're going to kick donkeys.

Which is what Baen has figured out. And O'Reilly has figured out. And a bunch of other publishers have figured out, especially the indies. Which is what has happened to my disposable income. They dispose of it for me. The cabal ... doesn't.

And of course, in the process you are not merely giving consumers a massive price break, you're cheapening the value of your product and giving authors a much lower royalty per book.

So do mass market paperbacks cheapen the value of books?

If so, why do publishers print so many of them?

Why do so many books appear only as MM paperbacks?

Why do authors seem quite content to get those royalties?

And why is selling an ebook for the price of a pbook count as a "massive price break" for anyone who doesn't think that an ebook, with all its restrictions and limitations, shouldn't sell for more than a pbook that is so much more usable?

As is the case in most businesses, Margins > Volume. If you don't believe me, start your own ebook publishing business with cut-rate prices and let us know how it works for you.

It's been done.

It seems to be working quite well, from the look of my PayPal account. Baen got me again. And I'm not caught up with the last batch yet! Plus there's what happened at O'Reilly's 2-for-1 sale ... ouch. Let's not even go into what authors who promote their books here on MR have done; when someone sells a book at impulse-buy prices, I'll buy it on impulse even if I don't know when I'll be able to get to reading it.

I remember the old Gramercy Park Clothes commercials. Particularly, I remember "We'd rather sell a million suits at a buck profit than one suit at a million profit." As I understand it, they were quite successful. Publishers and their million-dollar suits, so to speak, might do well to take a look at that tactic. If someone sells me ten books at a dollar profit or one book at a ten dollar profit, they're making the same ... and I'm a lot more likely to buy ten books.