Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
That's a statement based on wishes not fact. Amazon should be able to sell its Kindle for $19.99 and make a profit. That statement has as much validity as saying that a publisher plus the author plus the retailer can all make money selling no book for more than $9.99. A bold statement unsupported by any factual basis.
I know that a lot of ebookers make the statement but repeating it a million times doesn't make it true. It MAY be true, but no one has yet PROVEN it is true. All of us base our pricing statements on pure conjecture. I admit I do not know that a Random House cannot be profitable selling all of its books at no more than $9.99, but I do know that when I was the head of a small publishing company in the early 1990s, we couldn't.
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I suspect that Amazon, and most consumers, don't care whether you can be profitable at $9.99. If that's all they are prepared to pay for your books you'll either find a way to be profitable, or go out of business.
I get the impression that publishing has been a cost driven industry for some time, and fairly heavily protected for a good part of that time in terms of price maintenance. I don't think it can be any longer. Internet selling, Amazon in particular maybe, but all internet selling is very much consumer and price driven. There are a multitude of sites with instant price comparisons, there are discount coupon threads on this board. A business model that says "you have to pay x, because our costs are y" is very difficult to sustain in that environment. And just about impossible when there is a cheaper alternative.
It's "Adapt or Die" time.