Quote:
Originally Posted by Timoleon
I think the wise thing for Penguin to do would be to sell the ebook for a dollar or two less than the pbook --- a nice symbolic gesture which shows they realize that ebooks and pbooks are different birds of a feather, and it would create good will within the buying community. By the way, by "pbook" I mean "paperback book" and not hard cover. If penguin wants to charge the same for an ebook as for a hard cover book --- that's a practice that I predict will be DOA.
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that's definitely a good start, although i admit i did interpret the article as meaning the same price as a *hard cover* book (or the oversize paper backs which are sometimes released as the first edition, instead of a hardback, and are much more expensive than the later release of the pocket size paperback).
personally, as i have stated
elsewhere, i think that
the price of an ebook should not be more than HALF the price of a pbook.
it is a question of production costs : the price of a paperbook can be justified by saying there is the cost of the paper and the ink and the binding and the shipping and the overhead involved in storage facilities and the salaries of all the people involved in each of these steps. these are costs which are eliminated in the case of an ebook. the publisher saves money, and should pass the savings along to the customer, which will in turn encourage the customer to buy more books from that publisher, because they will appreciate the honest dealings of this publisher and want to continue to do business with them.