Quote:
Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer
If customers aren't willing to pay $15 for an ebook, all the moaning about cost structures is pointless. The publishers have it totally backwards - you start with what a customer is willing to pay and go from there, rather than deciding what you must charge and then telling the customer why your product is going to cost more than they want to pay. Customers don't care about your business, they just want the product.
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The problem is that big publishers haven't historically considered their customers to be readers, but the retailers they dealt with on a day to day basis. It's retailers they've marketed to in order to get prime store space, and retailers they've tried to impress with their newest offering. Even getting publishers to think readers are actually important to their business is an entirely new mindset for them.
Their resistance to ebooks is evidence of this, because they are resisting with all their might, despite how much readers demonstrably want ebooks available. Their tone-deafness on pricing, the inability to contact a human at a publisher directly when you find an ebook with problems, all of it -- as unbelievable as it seems, the BPH's still don't seem to get that the people who actually read the books are really important to their business.