Quote:
Originally Posted by hpjrt
Am I willing to pay the same price for a newly released ebook as I might be for a hard cover? Absolutely not. With an ebook, there aren't the costs of producing a hard cover. There's no paper ... no binding costs ... no shipping and no storage costs. In fact, theoretically, once the manuscript is input [and preferably proofread] it's a simple matter of bouncing the input version into various formats ... and you have an ebook.
The costs of producing a hard cover, of shipping a hard cover and of warehousing a hard cover dictate, in part, the cost of that hard cover. Without those costs, the publisher could charge less for the ebook and still make the same margin of profit and pay the author the same royalty.
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Your facts are correct but the problem is that they don't mean what you believe they should mean.
In the last week, I have bought two ebooks. I paid the same price as the discounted price for the newly released hardback. Neither of these books are what I would call "keepers." Two years ago, I would have bought them as hardbacks, passed them off to a couple of my sons, and the books would have wound up at the church book sale. Now, my sons have access to my Amazon account & download their own ebook copies. (Of course, the church is out a couple of bucks on the book sale.) From the buying & reading perspective, there's no difference between the ebook & pbook versions of these books.
I also bought a hardback of a book which I intend to keep after I have read it. It's not in ebook form right now - perhaps this book will be issued as an ebook at some later time. Makes no difference to me, I want the pbook
qua pbook. (Well, I wouldn't mind having the ebook version, too, because it's easier to read books on an EBR, at least for me.)
These two kinds of buying behavior represent two different markets - disposable books and non-disposable books. Where the line is drawn for any individual reader is not important. Now, I know that some ebook readers keep all their ebooks. Just like some pbook readers keep all theirs. What's important is that ebooks are heavily represented on the disposable side - and so are most pbooks.
Even most hardbacks are ultimately disposable, just like ebooks and paperbacks. They just don't seem disposable because they are disposed of by putting them in bookshelves, where they stay until the owner moves or dies.
And the price you pay for a disposable book is going to be the same in either form.
What this suggests to me is that the effect of the facts you lay out will be that publishers should eventually stop releasing pbooks which fall in the "disposable" category. That seems to be happening with CDs, for instance, which are analogous to pbooks. What might prevent that is the different flavors of proprietary EBRs, so that unlike with music, you can't "play" all ebooks on any EBR. This gives pbooks the advantage of being on a universal reading device - paper.
If it is true that most books - p or e - fall into the disposable category, then price parity is most economically advantageous strategy for publishers and sellers to market them. It gives all customers the same product for the same price, just on different delivery systems. It seems reasonable to suppose that this would result in the most profit. And it's profit that drives the system, not costs.