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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Anyone who thinks that books are entirely a niche good is getting stats from people who read less than five books a year.
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I'm not talking about the number of books read, but the amount of money spent on books. From a publishers perspective, it'd be more profitable if you spent your 50$ ebook budget on five 10 dollar books than on 10 five dollar books.
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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
The rest of us read what's available in our budget.
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The issue is whether the price of ebooks changes the total amount you spend on them. I'll use ticket prices as an example. Suppose that movies started charging 20$ a ticket instead of 10$. Suppose you were spending 20$ a month on tickets (two movies per month). There are three things you could do in response to this price change. You could
1. Still spend 20$ a month on movies, but only see one instead of two movies a month. For the movie industry this outcome is a wash.
2. Still see 2 movies a month, but cut 20$ in a month in savings or in spending on other parts of your budget. From the perspective of the movie industry this is a gain.
3. Say f*ck that and spend your 20$ on booze and pizza instead. From the perspective of the movie industry this is a big loss.
Another scenario would be that they raise prices to 15$ a month. In that scenario, you could spend 15$ and save 5$, seeing one movie a month every three months and two movies in month four. But considering that your desire to spend will likely remain the same, you'll likely just spend see one movie every month and spend the 5$ elsewhere, which means the price increase would result in reduced revenues.
I frequently come across books that I would like to buy but are out of the range that I am willing to spend. Since I am not looking to spend on books just for the sake of spending on books, those higher prices simply mean lost sales from me (although that is probably compensated for by other people willing to spend the 20+ dollars on an individual ebook).