Hey, there should be a sticky for " people who want to complain about agency pricing" . Every three days or so , someone pops up with pretty much the exact same statement.
Mike Shatzkin says the following:
Quote:
A cost-driven print book commercial model has created a legacy business which has made consumers willing to pay $25-30 for what is for many an 8-10 hour immersive reading experience. Millions of readers conditioned this way find paying around half that price to be a great bargain. The entire mechanism by which those printed books have been selected and delivered — the aggregation and curation of the major publishers’ offerings — is depended upon by the consumers who spend all that money.
No doubt, over time this will change. The print book infrastructure, which has inventory and supply chain costs that are responsible for the pricing conventions that have developed, will not last forever. Almost certainly, books will get cheaper and cheaper. But writers will also make less money when there is less to divide, not more. All writers, whether they’re among the fortunate ones that have a publisher pushing them or whether they’re trying to do it themselves, should be grateful that publishers are doing their damnedest to maintain prices and the perception of value for writers’ work. If that segment of consumers that complains about prices finds fault with agency pricing and the publishers’ insistence that the digital discount from the highest print price be limited to about 50% at the moment, that’s understandable.
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I think it comes down to just that. For the average consumer, the current price model (14.99 for the e-book version of a new release, 12.99 for a new release that becomes a bestseller) is a great deal . They think of that as half price- all for something that they can buy in their pajamas, without burning $3.50 per gallon gas to go to the B&M store. Sure, DRM blah, blah, blah, but for the average consumer, that stuff doesn't register.
While the average consumer thinks that these are good prices, that's what the publishers will charge. Indie authors can earn themselves a place at the table by competing on price ( and earn brownie points with the tech community by loudly proclaiming their opposition to big publisher "price fixing"). But the price for ebooks will be what the market can bear , not what techies THINK the "right price" should be.
Eventually, the prices of books will drift down over time as the print book infrastructure goes away.But that will be in 5/10 years. For right now, it is what it is.