Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
I can get most hardcovers for $.01+shipping, a few months after release. Publishers who want to protect their profits should be taking a hard look at the secondary markets, not ebooks, as competition.
Ebooks *could* be their ticket to competing with that market--$4 for the hardcover, delivered in 3-5 days, vs. $4 for the ebook, delivered now. Instead, they're trying to believe that the customers are choosing between ebook for $14 and new hardcover for $20, or ebook for $8 delivered now or paperback for $8+shipping, delivered in 3-5 days.
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My point all along has been that the book industry has 4 price points, hardcover, trade paperback, mass market paperback, and used (approximately half MMPB price), and book buyers tend to choose their price based on how long they're willing to wait to buy it. The publishers want to ignore the used price point. I suspect that it's because they're convinced that if they sell ebooks that are now out of print in paper at used book prices, it will cannibalize the new book sales.
Even more outrageous are all of the "contemporary classics", which have been in print in one form or another since they were first published sometime within the last 50 years, which get a trade paperback price for the ebook edition. I think most of these books would end up recovering the cost of creating ebook editions faster if they priced them to be between used and MMPB. I know the high prices stops me from replacing my paper copies with ebooks.