Well, pardon me for not thinking much of the OH IF YOU SILLY GRASSHOPPERS WOULD STICK TO A BUDGET high horse.
This isn't -- to me, anyway -- about oh my gawd, Miss Scarlet, however
will I buy my ebooks? I DON'T KNOW NOTHING ABOUT NO FREE FORUM DEALS! *breathy panic*
It's about being irritated when I want to replace my copy of "The Sound and the Fury" with an ebook version only to zip over to B&N and have a $10 ebook and a $8 paperback listed on the same page. For a book whose author died -- what? -- 50 years ago? 60? I've lost count.
Sure, I can choose not to buy the ebook. (In fact, I have.
) I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. But next week Knopf is going to choose NOT to publish a backlist book that I actually WOULD buy at $10, and they're going to say it's because backlist publishing isn't profitable -- after all, not a single person was interested enough to buy their Faulkner stuff!
So all this smoke and mirrors about BUT SO MANY BOOKS ARE FREE and IF YOU NINNIES JUST KNEW HOW TO BUDGET is all just a moral high horse that distracts from the issue:
Publishers are, in my opinion, deliberately making ebook publishing a lot less profitable than it needs to be. And then using that lack of profits as a justification to drive down availability and drive up profits even more. (Because we have to price even higher to make a profit on the few who will buy!)
Does it keep me up at night? Heck no. I rock the Free Forum just as much as
everyone else on Mobile Reads. (Like, seriously? You know where the Free Forum is? That's nice. Yeah, you are not special. Everyone else sees that forum too. Just saying.) But it's danged annoying. I won't cry a single tear for the big publishers if they accidentally price themselves out of business.
(Oh, and for the record, the term for someone who likes to post condescending posts on the internet about how people should manage their money as if we've all been blowing it all on sweeties this entire time? It's Homo Ignorus.)