Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
A new book you expect to sell tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions.
Backlist books where you might sell a few tens of books? There's just no money in selling so few books to make it worth the effort if you can't sell them for a good deal more than the used paper back book bin.
Right. A nickel an ebook is something buyers are VERY willing to pay....just not so many producers willing to work for that amount of pay.
But WAIT....the OP said he was willing to pay a whopping $3.98!
Exactly. Just buy that paper back from the bin you saw it in.
Lee
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You've managed to insert an impressive number of strawman arguments into a small section of text; bravo!
No one is saying that publishers must put out ebook versions of niche books. However, with new books, there's no reason for a publisher not to create an ebook version as a normal part of its business; it would be stupid for them not to. And I would expect the price of the new ebooks to reflect the restrictions placed on them and the costs to the publisher. I can't think of any reason that a new ebook should ever cost more than its new pbook equivalent.
No one is saying people should only pay a nickel. This isn't the case of people wanting a free lunch, it about consumers having a legitimate disagreement with publishers about the value of ebooks. There are numerous examples of new and fairly new books on Amazon where the ebook is more than the pbook; how can this be justified? If a publisher can make money at a certain price on a pbook, then it stands to reason that they could make money at the same price (or less) on an ebook as the ebook has no: (i) printing costs; (ii) marginal costs of effectively nil; (iii) no costs associated with warehousing, etc.
Here's what happening in the industry: ebooks are relatively new and publishers want as much money as they can get so they keep pushing up the price of ebooks. Publishers haven't yet realized that they could probably make more by offering more and reach a bigger audience if they used a little more creativity in pricing schemes other than just saying a book is a book is a book.