Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
The pricing? Last I heard, the average of the prices of the most popular commercial fiction ebooks at the Kindle store was $6.31. At $7.99 they're actually charging a 30% premium. Sneaky, aren't they?  |
That's not the pricing I've been talking about. The book I mentioned, Neil Stephenson's
Mongolian: Book One, is new and has just been published by Amazon for $7.99.
Major publishers' prices for any books by Stephenson, let alone, new ones, are higher. Note that
Snow Crash, a very old book by the same author, is currently priced at $9.99.
The focus is this: new books from major publishers and books for which publishers demand ridiculous premiums no matter how old they might be. I've seen ePub editions listed in the Google eBookstore priced at over a hundred dollars.
The two-dollar margin in Stephenson's and others' case, and instances of ridiculous pricing at Google's eBookstore, are the kinds of excesses Amazon might be aiming at with strategies like 47North.
Quote:
Originally Posted by xg4bx
if publishers feel the squeeze they'll be forced to drop the prices of their books accordingly.
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Exactly. I was thinking specifically of the price war Amazon tried to fight with publishers prior to Jobs' cutting deals for the iPad, as discussed in this New Yorker article:
"Publish or Perish"