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Originally Posted by EricDP
Whatever the case, I think two things: 1) you're tenacious at defending your point, even if few others agree, and 2) we still don't agree on what price would yield the highest profits based on a combination of unit price and fixed price. I still think that, since the unit price is almost nothing for a eBook, the sales price could be a lot lower, yielding much greater sales, offsetting fixed price more quickly, and yielding higher profits.
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As for 1 above, it really doesn't
matter whether people agree with me or not. I've been an observer of publishing for decades. Most of the folks I know and hang out with these days are in publishing, and I talk to them. I happen to actually know a bit about it, and try to pass along some of what I know in discussions like this.
If I'm correct in my assertions, it doesn't matter whether you believe me or like it, it's simply the way things are. The fact that you don't believe something doesn't make it untrue.
As for 2, we have a differing notion of unit costs. As mentioned, the print/bind/warehouse/distribute steps for pbooks is about 20% of the total costs for a book. The rest occur before the book is published in any form, and each book will get an allocated share of corporate overhead. Those costs get allocated across the production run, and
become unit costs.
The fact that it's an ebook does not magically make costs other than the print/bind/warehouse/distribute costs go way. The ebook is simply another format for the book, along with hardcover, trade paperback, and mass market paperback. Each book has a P&L, and the ebook will be expected to contribute to revenue and help cover expenses.
If the ebook is the
only edition published, the print/bind/warehouse/distribute costs go away, but the rest don't. If the ebook is he only edition, you still have to sell X copies at Y price to cover costs and make money. The questions are what X and Y are.
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You still haven't come close to convincing me that eBook prices should be the same as pBook prices. They should be lower, no matter how you spin it. Especially after the paperback comes out for less that the eBook - that is unforgivable!
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I'm not trying to convince you the the ebook price should be the same as the pbook. What I
am trying to do is give reasons why the ebook price is unlikely to be as low as a lot of folks would like it to be. It won't be because it
can't be if the publisher wants to stay in business.
Agreed on the unhappiness of an ebook having a much higher price than the pbook. I'm not trying to defend that sort of nonsense. There's an awful lot of wishful thinking on the part of publishers about how much they can charge, just as there's a lot of wishful thinking on the part of buyers on how cheap an ebook can be, and various publishers will find out the hard way they have inflated notions.
Ultimately, I think the price for an ebook will level out to comparable with the MMPB edition,
when the MMPB edition is released. Ebooks released at the same time as the hardcover will carry a higher price.
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Dennis