Quote:
Originally Posted by ginolee
I think, like stocks, people will be willing to pay what they think a piece of digital content is worth. If they think a particular item is overpriced, less people will buy it and over time the price will come down or the product will be discontinued.
Gino.
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Interesting analogy; if more people buy a particular stock the price rises (demand) whereas if more people buy a pbook, we'd expect the price to fall (economies of scale, retailer competition etc...) - I wonder which direction we'd expect the price of a poplar eBook to go in? And why would a low-selling (unpopular?) ebook be reduced in price, given the near-zero cost of storing and distributing digital content?
I agree, though, that books (e or p) are only 'worth' what people are willing to pay for them. Just to bring the music analogy back for a minute, Radiohead (a popular music group, m'lud...) recently released an album available as download only, and let people pay what they liked for it; the average turned out to be something like £2.90 (~ $6 USD) and the headlines in the press were of the 'most fans download album for free' variety. It' not as simple as that, though. Maybe people downloaded the album just to see if they could. Maybe they downloaded it and didn't pay because they were planning to buy the £40 ($80) boxed set anyway - or maybe it was a terrible album, and people just didn't want to pay for it?
Either way, 1.2 million downloads at $6 a pop is still a nice piece of change - and possibly more than the band would have earned had they released the CD through their record company. Here's the thing, though; musicians don't earn
that much from 'content' sales - their main income comes from selling £75/ticket concerts and tours (and yes, I'm aware that I'm generalising). But if you write books, there's not much else you can do. Sure there are signings and readings, but I don't think they attract the same sort of crowds as a pop concert.
I've wondered for a while if we'd ever see CD and download sales almost as a 'loss leader' for concert ticket sales and in that same vein, if eBooks (or parts of) will be regarded as a loss leader for books. And maybe Amazon's 'first chapter free' approach with the Kindle is a step in that direction.
Sorry, this thread seems to have rambled off-topic a bit...
So, Kindle. Haven't seen one in the flesh (different continent) but from the pictures I have seen, and other people's responses to it, I like it. I think it'll do well. Even the look is growing on me - striking, perhaps, rather than atractive. As for the negative comments from the ebook 'old hands' (and please don't take this the wrong way - I mean no offense here) well, the more they complain about what it doesn't do for them, the more I think it's probably meant for me; it's a mass-market device, and I'm pretty sure my needs are more mass-market than most on this board. PDF support? Closed loop? Clunky browser? As long as it works, I don't care. Expensive? Don't buy it - it's only worth what people are prepared to pay for it.
My two-penneth. Cheers, Pete.