Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
The people willing to pay the most, set the market, not the folks who say "that's too much".
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Wrong.
Let's take, as a hypothetical example, some ebook which is sold for $1,000. Exactly one person is willing to buy it for that price. So does that one person set the price?
In that same market, there are 500 people who are willing to pay $10 for the book. If the publisher sold it for $1,000, he'd make $1000; if he sold it for $10, he'd make $5,000. Are you saying that he should sell it for $1,000 because that person is willing to pay the most?
It's not the person who pays the most that matters. It's the market segment that, collectively, nets the most profit that matters. That's the number of buyers times the profit per book. And that rarely involves only the people who are willing to pay the most. That one guy may pay 100x what the other 499 would for our hypothetical ebook, but there's only one of him. He, in fact, is the one who doesn't matter.
The
only thing that matters is the total profit a publisher can make on a book. That's what the publishers are forgetting. They're looking at the problem in detail terms: how can we keep ebooks from cutting into the sales of our hardcovers? They're looking at the segments individually. They're studying the trees, as it were, and ignoring the forest. And it's the forest that matters: the total income a publisher can derive from that book. Some of them have figured that out. They sell me (and a lot of other people) ebooks. The cabal hasn't figured that out yet, or maybe they have, but they think they can push a rope anyway. They're making a short-term trade, using short-term thinking, and it's going to bite them in the end.