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Originally Posted by GreenMonkey
Yeah. They don't understand that they are attempting to do exactly the same thing as the music industry did. Except the saving grace of the music industry has become $1 tracks you can buy individually - even cheaper than a used CD if you only want one track - so they had somewhere, at least, to backpeddle to.
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They're not, though. People often make this claim, but they've forgotten what the music industry's problems actually were.
1. The music industry's first problem was that they didn't provide *any* source for legally buying mp3's, hoping that the napster et al. would just go away.
The book publishers have not done this.
2. The second mistake that music publishers made was, once they decided to make mp3s available, they did so in a disorganized manner...you had to go to each publisher to purchase music initially.
The book publishers have not done this.
3. The third mistake that they made was that they didn't want to sell individual songs - they only gave you the option of buying the entire album.
This isn't relevant to books.
What the music industry didn't do was drastically cut prices - the $10 for an album from iTunes was roughly what it cost to buy a CD at Walmart at the time.
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The price on backlist ebooks should be more in line with the used market. Only huge ebook fans buy a backlist ebook for $8 that they can't share when they could get a paperback for $2 at the local used book store - or a penny + $2.99 shipping from Amazon marketplace. Or, even cheaper - torrent for free a copy that you can share across devices and accounts.
You think that a dropping price over time strategy would come into play for ebooks, in an effort to make money on those that would simply buy used. Somehow they seem to expect that some sort of magic inherent in ebooks will make people pay 4x what it costs to buy a used paperback.
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There's no point in trying to compete with the used market.