[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

But since you *can* buy the books, they aren't georestricted to you.

Yes. But note where I have to buy them. To buy the British edition, I must order from the British Amazon operation. It's quite legal for them to take my order and ship to me in the US. It's not legal for Amazon US to sell them to me.

But for the georestriction problem it means: look, but don't touch, or to be more precise: we sell the ebook, but not to you.

Yes. It's a problem. I don't see a quick solution, for reasons already mentioned. It will still be a problem even if the publisher is international in scope. If I sell a book the Macmillan in the US, for example, I might also sell a British edition to Macmillan UK. While both are units of Holtzbrink in Germany, they are separate divisions with separate P&ls, and in projects where both are involved, I'll expect, um "discussion", when it comes time to decide whose budget gets what expenses, revenues, and profits.

Can you please read what you quote? I didn't say that you said that costs are double counted, but that "the publishers effectively count everything twice".

Sorry. Correction accepted. But why do you think they count everything twice? Got an example?

You're imagining things

I imagine six impossible things before breakfast.

But I encounter enough resistance to posts like this on MR that I'm forced to conclude a lot of folks simply don't want to hear anything that disagrees with their notion of how little an ebook ought to cost.

I like to argue in general, and it is very easy to argue with vague statements (I am a physicist, so for me anything that doesn't involve exact values and doesn't go by formulas is vague).

Then I fear just about all of this stuff will be vague. It's not physics.

The situation is different in the case of a new self published author who gives only the ebook version as some of the costs are just not there (the author does the editing and proofreading and cover art). Also, the perspective is different: since the author is also the publisher, the royalties also go to paying for the things that are outsourced, making the profits smaller than they seem. To an individual, doing something in the evening means no cost; to a company it means overtime.

You think the author places no value on her time? But yes, self-publishing is a completely different business model.

But this is all guess work on my part.

Mine too. I just happen to think mine is an informed guess.

Removing costs would always mean that the price can be lower, but I agree that there is the matter of how much. I didn't assume that the .99 prices were a matter of great coincidence

Agreed, removing costs means the price can be lower. It doesn't mean it will be.

If I'm a producer of any product, I'm always interested in lowering my costs. If my costs are lower, more of the revenue I get in sales flows to my bottom line. Whether I'll reduce the price I charge for my product is another matter. I'll cut the price because I have to to respond to competition. If I think I can successfully maintain my price where it is to benefit from my lowered costs, I'll do just that.
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Dennis