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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
The hardback/paperback division is just an accepted mechanism to hide the fact that you're paying more because of demand. Ebook pricing just makes this pricing dynamic more apparent.
It's not "greed," it's "business." A company does not have any sort of obligation to base its pricing exclusively off of costs.
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I agree with the principle of these points, but I still don't agree with what the publishers are doing. Because they aren't saying that the prices come from demand, they are saying that they are barely making a living with these prices. There was this
article that was posted on the forums before that states just that:
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In fact, the industry is based on the understanding that as much as 70 percent of the books published will make little or no money at all for the publisher once costs are paid.
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But before that wonderful statement the article mentions this:
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Moreover, in the current print model, publishers can recoup many of their costs, and start to make higher profits, on paperback editions.
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So the bottom line is that the publishers are either lying through their teeth about the incurring costs, or are incompetent businessmen. My guess is that it is a little of both, but take your pick.

I was looking around the net for the history of paperbacks and I found
this.
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That same year, Carey's Library of Choice Literature offered the public reprints of English novels one chapter per week. The chapters were distributed to subscribers by mail, bound in paper, sold for ten cents each, were about the size of modern paperbacks, but consisting of only one chapter, they can hardly be considered "books". Nonetheless, the United States Post Office ruled they were books, charged a higher rate, and killed the Library in its tracks.
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My point is that higher prices aren't doing anybody any good. This didn't work when most people didn't know how to read and didn't have today's entertainment possibilities, so it's not going to work when we have access to this many public domain books and the darknet.
Plus all the advantages of ebooks come from the device used to view them, so taking credit for that just doesn't sit right with me.