[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Then I am asking you, what would happen to their pbook business? They would also have to sell those for extremely low amounts (or nobody would buy them) -- and they would all go out of business. Sounds great for users, but publishers and book sellers could not operate this way.

Such low prices can only work for a self publishing author with sales on the web only.

The publishers who have released info about it have all said that low ebook prices & promos increase their print sales, or at least not hurt them. (O'Reilly print sales have been dropping, as many publishers have--but their ebook sales have been increasing faster than print has been dropping. They haven't been losing 1 print sale per ebook sale.)

Baen went from a small paperback-focused science fiction publisher to a hardcover-and-paperback bestseller producing publisher after they started giving away substantial numbers of ebooks.

Besides, why should we care about costs, what matters is how much are we willing to pay and is anyone willing to sell at that price. For the publisher the point is, total sales volume has to be high enough to cover development, production, distribution costs AND to make a reasonable profit. Even for ebooks there are distribution costs such as advertising.

For ebooks, *all* that matters to cover those costs is sales volume. They could price all ebooks at $1, and if there's enough volume, that would cover costs. (It'd take too many; it's not worth doing.) For pbooks, there's a price below which someone (the store, the distributor, or the publisher) doesn't make a profit on that title; that price is "production costs + a bit for overhead."

Ebooks don't have that limitation; publishers should be bouncing the prices all over trying to find the sweet spot that maximizes sales & profits. But some publishers aren't treating ebooks as a new market, a chance to reach people who were never going to buy new hardcovers. They're treating it as cannibalization of their current market, and fighting to keep it from growing.

We can go on and on about "ebooks cost virtually nothing to make", what does it matter if nobody is willing to sell them for next to nothing?

But some people are. How will it affect the Big Six publishers in the long run if their competition is selling ebooks at half or a quarter of their prices?