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Originally Posted by leebase
I love Baen as well. But the only competition I'm aware of for Baen is Tor. Sci Fi is not all that big of a genre these days.
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"Sci Fi" might not be. SF certainly is.
As for SF publishers, you're ignoring Ace, DAW, some random number of Harper imprints, Del Rey ... oh, why am I bothering. Your mind is made up, and you won't let anyone confuse you with facts.
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Now if Bean were selling romance novels, or had the likes of Patterson or Dan Brown -- THEN it's business practices might be giving other folks something to think about.
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Nearly all romance novels are released only as mass market paperbacks. By your own definition, those do not matter.
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All I'm suggesting is folks just realize that they have NEVER (or rarely) been participants in the new book market. Their expectations about what a book should cost are out of line with the market.
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With your definition of "the new book market" as "people who pay the publisher's list price for hardcover books" most people aren't. Fortunately for a lot of people (particularly those cashing royalty checks), other people consider
anyone who buys a new book, any format, any price, not just those who buy HCs at full price, to be participants in the market in question. Otherwise, I'd really have to question what all those romance publishers are doing, and what those stores full of MM paperbacks are all about.
Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.
Normally, the market sets the prices. In the case of the ebook cabal, what is described by the law as a combination in restraint of trade is setting those prices. That's taking the whole market part out of it: "If you want to buy the books we have a monopoly on, you have to buy them at our prices, because we won't let you buy them at any other prices, and we won't let retailers sell them to you at any price except the one we set." Those companies whose prices are controlled by the free market (sorry if that term scares you, but I'm a capitalist, and I'm rather fond of it) set their prices based on what brings in the most money. The cabal publishers don't have to, since they've formed a cartel, and they have astroturfers and shills to tell everyone they're right. The market is, not unnaturally, complaining.