Quote:
Originally Posted by carld
I've seen it with a number of books. It's insane that an ebook costs more than a hardback, but it definitely happens.
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That's because the publishing industry is locked into the concept of scarcity, the idea that books exist in limited quantities because of the time and expense necessary to produce them. Of course this doesn't apply to ebooks because once the ebook file has been created, there are no further production costs associated with that particular book. But apparently the publishing industry is unwilling to abandon traditional financial models and so they treat ebooks just like they do regular books with the exception that there's less incentive to put books on sale because there's no pressing need to clear out existing inventory to make room for new stock, and so prices stay high while the prices of physical books tend to fluctuate.