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Originally Posted by Worldwalker
In short, retailers can't be retailers.
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I wouldn't go that far. But yes, they do get treated as agents of the publisher, hence the name.
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Originally Posted by Worldwalker
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.
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Actually, my opinions of "what people want" have been partially shaped
by MR poster reactions.
I firmly believe most people have emotional reactions to the price, and work backwards from there.
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Originally Posted by Worldwalker
Readers want the free market to control book pricing.
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No, they want
cheap books. Heck,
I want cheap books.
I just recognize that is not how things work.
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Originally Posted by Worldwalker
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.
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OK, so Apple setting the $1-per-song price point was a terrible thing? Or Amazon demanding $10 per ebook is also bad? Got it.
And let's be real here. The price for many ebooks
was over $10, if you bought it from Sony or B&N. Amazon basically subsidized ebook purchases in order to dominate the market and *cough* centrally set prices for their customers once they had a lock.
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Originally Posted by Worldwalker
Like some people are "differently abled" because they can't walk?
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No.
Paper is restricted in ways that digital is not, and vice versa. We are simply all very comfortable with paper's restrictions -- to the point where we accept it as a physical given and don't even think about it.
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Originally Posted by Worldwalker
You're forgetting one other critical thing that sets that price: what the buyer is willing to pay.
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Not at all. I've been talking about demand and tiered pricing quite a bit. Feel free to re-read my posts at your leisure.
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Originally Posted by Worldwalker
Except that the publisher isn't making $10 from the $25 hardcover....
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Allow me to clarify.
A publisher most likely receives $10 in
revenues for a $25 hardcover, and $3 in
revenues from a $10 ebook.
In order to generate identical
revenues, in that circumstance they need to sell 3.3 times as many copies.
The "paper" costs for the publisher are only around 15% of the book's cost. So to make the same
profits, they need to sell 2.85 times more books.
It takes more than just a low price to double or triple your sales --
all of your sales, by the way. You also need to market aggressively, which in turn (surprise!) negatively impacts your margins. There are no free lunches.
I.e. that brief blip did not discuss costs at all -- most of which stay the same: advance, royalty rate, editing costs, marketing, PR, overhead, taxes, and so forth.
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Originally Posted by Worldwalker
....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.
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Yeah, I dunno.
You may be right that for the big book buyers, it's a zero-sum game. However, I don't believe Joe Target is dealing with low
budgets, they're just not interested in books -- regardless of pricing.
Plus, if the only way to get Joe Target to buy dozens of books is to slash margins to the bone, why bother?
Sorry to remind you that this is a business, and it's driven by margins. Publishing is not charity work.
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Originally Posted by Worldwalker
Cut your $25 book to $10, and you may very well sell 2.5x as many of them.
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Perhaps. But what are you basing this on? Market research, perhaps? Analysis of sales?
If you re-read my posts, I have not excluded the possibility that you
could have a big jump in sales to match revenues/profits. My point is that as ordinary consumers, few people realize exactly how many more books need to be sold to make up for the lost revenues.
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Originally Posted by Worldwalker
So do mass market paperbacks cheapen the value of books?
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Pretty much
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Originally Posted by Worldwalker
If so, why do publishers print so many of them? Why do so many books appear only as MM paperbacks?
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• To capture more revenue, after the initial high demand has dropped.
• Not all books are (or need to be) high-value.
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Originally Posted by Worldwalker
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.
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Oh? I've never heard of them, and they may not be in business any more. Meanwhile, Macy's charges full price most of the time and is still around. Go figure.
Some publishers do just fine with a low-margin, low-cost model -- e.g. genre publishers like Harlequin do very well. And if that's how they run their business, I have no problems with that. Big publishers even occasionally have smaller imprints that do the same thing.
However, not all books are generic genre works that can be cranked out like sausage, albeit by enthusiastic authors for an enthusiastic audience.