Quote:
Originally Posted by NVash
The paperback is $5, the hardback is $10, ebook is $12? Plus you have DRM on the ebook? It makes no sense but they dont care. I dont know much about how things work for them, who gets paid and how much but I honestly believe that the minute they start lowering prices theyll start making money hand over fist.
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I dunno about that. Things don't always behave in an arithmetical fashion. There's probably a sweet spot for profit consisting of (1) a certain number of ebooks sold at a certain price, that produces more profit than (2) more ebooks sold at a lower price, or (3) fewer ebooks sold at a higher price. Heck, there might also be a sweet spot at which a higher price sells MORE ebooks - people sometimes attach value to things that cost more. And it's probably different for different books.
In short, we seem to be in a pricing shakedown period, where publishers are trying out different strategies. The problem for publishers is to try to find the right mix of several things: book format, timing of issuance, relative pricing, and who knows what other things, all sufficient to maximize the return on investment.
I do know that a year ago, we all seemed to be talking about idiot publishers who would not issue ebooks at all, thus losing sales. Now more and more of them are not that kind of idiots. So now we are talking about idiot publishers who are not pricing ebooks correctly. A year from now, who knows?