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Originally Posted by rogue_librarian
Actually, it's not. Set one effing price that you're willing to sell for and be done with it.
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While I will not necessarily defend Australian publishers pushing extremely high prices, regional publishing actually does make sense in a lot of cases.
First, the cost of living varies greatly from one area to the next. It's good economic sense to charge more in countries where they can afford it, and less where the national income is lower.
Second, there are different costs to doing business in different countries. If the buyer is in the US, for example, the retailer might have to charge sales tax, or might not; if they are in the UK, they are required to charge VAT. You also have costs associated with currency conversion.
Third, it does make sense for a fair number of books and authors to have local publishers, rather than one publisher in one nation controlling all prices. A UK publisher is not going to know, understand, or have the resources to promote a book in the US
and Canada
and Australia
and translate it into dozens of languages. For an author with small sales this isn't an issue; for an author with sales large enough to really make a go at international distribution, it does.
Same thing for retailers, by the way. It also makes sense that the company have some kind of operations in the country, if they are large enough; otherwise it would be very hard for Aussie citizens to hold Amazon accountable if there's a major issue.
Of course, the issue here isn't the pricing, it's the availability. The Australian ebook market is still fairly small and new, so they have to go through the same growing pains as the US did. It won't take that long for it to get resolved, especially for new books; once ebooks go over 5% of the market, it makes increasing economic sense to issue the ebooks as quickly as possible. Most of the "zomg no ebook out for it" in the US is about obscure backlisted items, not new titles. (And yes, you have agency pricing to thank for that.)
Quote:
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Originally Posted by rogue_librarian
if somebody from India wanted to pay the US asking price, why not? And if they couldn't afford it and you wanted to offer a cheaper version for the Indian market, that's cool, too: just be prepared for additional business from outside the subcontinent, as it were.
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As in what, people are going to volunteer to pay more just for the fun of it?
