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Originally Posted by stonetools
I think, EM , you are right to distinguish between customers for used books and customers for new books. Where you are wrong is insisting that sellers of new books should compete for those customers by selling at new book prices. That makes about as much sense as saying that new car dealers should compete for used car customers by offering new cars at used car prices. Economically, the math just does not add up.
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Not my problem; I have plenty to read. It could potentially be a problem if authors stopped writing because it's no longer a profitable career... but I find that plenty of authors are making a living selling $3 books, perhaps because they're getting just as much money as they do from publishers who sell their books at $18.
I note that I have a budget for reading material, and I'm looking for value for my money. If publishers want a slice of that, they need to provide that value. If they aren't interested in my money, shrug; other people are.
Publishers used to claim that, for the higher price, readers were getting quality literature. That's harder to support these days, when self-published books are selling by the tens of thousands and sometimes millions (indicating that they're *enjoyed*, whether or not they match some objective level of quality), and mainstream published ebooks are often riddled with typos and formatting errors. There's no indication at all that paying an extra $10 gets a better reading experience.
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Maybe they aren't as clueless about prices as you think, because there is zero evidence that they are losing customers selling at those prices.
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Then why do they keep whining about how many millions of dollars they're "losing" to piracy? If those aren't lost customers, why do they care how much money they're not spending?
If the core issue is "how dare they read without paying us!" rather than "we're not making enough money!"--why aren't they screaming about used book sales?