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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Pricing and costs are a convoluted mess, but one thing I found was the complexity of a fair pricing formula increased by the square of the number of formats you offer. Just e-book? Easy peasy. E-book and paperback? 2 formats, 4 times as complex. E-book, paperback and hardcover? 3 formats, 9 times as complex....
