Quote:
Originally Posted by treadlightly
For those who do agree that pricing does indeed suck, what are we doing about it? We've debated the one-star rating campaign at Amazon. I can obstain from buying ebooks from the big-5. I can recommend reasonably priced books from other publishers. I can use the library. Is any of this effective in the long run?
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Here is something that would have effect -- convince one publisher to aggressively bundle some of their backlist novels. If just one major publisher were to do this, and if they were successful, the rest would quickly follow suit.
For example, imagine you went to buy Sue Grafton's latest
X is for Ex-Con novel (at $13.99), and you seen that you can buy all of the other 20 books in the series for $60 total (maybe you'd have to pay full price for the last 3 books in the series). I think a lot of the millions of new eReader owners would jump at buying all the old books. Doing something like this with paper based books probably isn't feasible (bookstores don't don't want to stock and display all these old books), but it is begging to be done with ebooks. If people could buy all of Ed McBain's
87th Precinct, or Christie's
Miss Marple, or Piers Anthony's
Xanth series, or <pick your favorite series> they would do so. The publishers wouldn't have to limit it to just series either. They could bundle all of Steinbeck's books for one low price. For that matter they could bundle a whole host of copyrighted Modern Classics, Science Fiction Classics, and Mystery Classics from various authors and sell them as bundles.
Unfortunately, instead of trying to take advantage of this kind of selling opportunity, the publishers seem to just see ebooks as some kind of threat.