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Originally Posted by Andrew H.
This has kind of been my theory on the pricing of a lot of e-books. The point of selling books is profit, not number sold. And for a lot of these books, you would have to have a *huge* increase in demand to see a corresponding increase in profits. And I don't think you would see this with many authors.
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Given that books aren't all sold at once, the best profit-maximizing approach is something like what the publishers already do: change pricing over time.
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I agree with you on this one, and IMHO, the publishers should be viewing it as setting a price point to compete with used paper books. However, I think that publishers won't set a price point to compete with used books any time soon, for two reasons. First, the market for new ereaders isn't saturated yet, and the publisher view all the new ereader customers as people willing to pay full price for "new" ebooks, because they don't know when ebooks have been released for several years. Second, the publishers know that lowering the price of older works can cause competition with new books, and since they make most of their money on new books, they don't want their old books to compete with their new ones.
If what I read recently is true, and the cost of producing really small print runs of trade paperbacks is under $10, we'll be seeing the publishers keeping old backlist books of big name authors in print in trade paperback just so they can justify keeping the price of the ebooks at the $10-15 price range. Bradbury's probably got several books that are commonly read in high school, so they'll definitely get enough paper sales per year to keep them in print and keep the ebook price high.