[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by GoversAU

I believe most if not all your arguments are defeated by what we've seen in the music market over the last few years.

I don't, because I don't see them as equivalent, but that's a different discussion.

I think Sonist pretty well does sum up a large expanse of the market.

How large an expanse? Don't assume you're representative of the market. Don't assume MR as a whole is representative. The folks who hang out here are "early adopters", and tend to be more savvy about the technology and the market place. You're comfortable finding things on torrent sites and doing conversions to get a format you can read. How about your grandmother?

And perception is the thing: you'll never convince the book-buying public that an ebook is worth even 50% of the price of a paperback let alone a hardcover. They know they aren't buying a book: they can never sell it, loan it, pass it to their kids. Ebooks make books a disposable commodity and the public will expect them to be priced accordingly.

Oh, really? Explain how Amazon is so successful selling ebooks at a default $9.99 price when the corresponding PB edition is cheaper.

A lot of folks are simply going to be disappointed if they expect ebooks from anyone but self-publisher to be priced at half the price of a mass market PB edition. That simply isn't possible for any regular publisher who wants to stay in business. (And contrary to what you might like to believe, they aren't going away any time soon.)

I've bought nearly 300 ebooks since May, most in the 99c to 3.99 price range from indie authors. Only two cost more than $10, and about 10-15 around $9. Very few of those indie books failed to maintain my interest for whatever reason; I don't think the ratio would be much worse than with big name authors and publishing houses.

I don't. I'm happy that you found enough stuff from indie authors that you found readable. My mileage would vary. I've been conditioned by publishers serving as crud filters. I read a fair bit of off beat and experimental fiction, but there's a limit to the time and effort I'll spend panning for literary gold in the Great Slushpile of the Internet. I have better uses for the time, and I'll happily spend more for a book published by a house whose taste I trust with editors to help an author turn a manuscript from "good" to "great".

And I know an assortment of authors trying to make a living writing (or at least a good chunk of it). They will not do that as indies.

Either publishers get rid of agency models and adapt very quickly, or they will be dinosaurs. The ebook leaps ahead very quickly and the Agency 6 are being left behind.

It's the Agency 5. Random House did not jump on that bandwagon.
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Dennis