Quote:
Originally Posted by avantman42
Why not? Surely once you've sold enough e-books at a given price, you can afford to drop the price. At that point, people who would have bought used paper books may buy the e-book.
Most of the paper books I've bought were second hand. I haven't bought a paper book since I bought my Kindle. I rarely (if ever) pay more than £5 for an e-book, I either wait for it to come down in price or I don't buy it. Just last night I checked the price of a book I'm interested in. It's still more than I want to pay, so I didn't buy it. If it ever comes down in price enough, I'll buy it, if not, I'll read something else. My waiting for the price to come down is analogous to waiting to find it second hand when I bought paper books. If the publisher never reduces the price, they'll never get my money, and I think that's a lost opportunity.
|
That sounds reasonable, but isn't. If ebook prices did drop to second-hand-pbook levels then the publishers would ruin the value of their ebooks. Then almost nobody would buy early, but everybody would wait for the price to drop to extremely low levels. Regular prices would drop since early buyers would assume that the value of a new ebook is only as much as a second hand paperback.
You are assuming that everything else would stay the same, but that they would just create some additional sales and (given the fact that production cost for each additional ebook is near zero) additional profits. However, this would only make sense many years after the original run. You cannot allow such super low prices to affect overall pricing.