Quote:
Originally Posted by VillageReader
Fictionwise does have one of his books from a St. Martin's imprint ( http://fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook2116.htm) copyright 2002 at a HARDBACK price. Again, convoluted logic - are they trying to 'prove' there is no ebook market? Why would someone buy an ebook at around $17 after rebates that you can probably pick up in a dead tree edition for around $8? |
I don't know what Fictionwise pays St. Martins, but I suspect their price is determined in part by what St. Martin's charges them.
And that sort of issue is a quandary even in pure paper editions. Tor learned the hard way to be careful about timing when remaindering a hardcover edition, after they remaindered the HCs of a couple of Robert Jordan Wheel of Time novels at the same time they put out the mass market PB editions. You could buy the remainder HC at someplace like Barnes and Noble
cheaper than the MMPB...
Ultimately, pricing is one of the big issues a publisher must deal with. There will be a cost to them to produce the book, whether in paper or electronic form. They must purchase the rights, edit the manuscript, and mark it up for production. Each book will also carry a share of the overhead of the overall operation. And even with ebooks, there are costs for servers to store them, bandwidth to produce them, and website maintenance to let you buy them. That will set a base price they will need to charge to simply cover their costs.
Beyond that, they will want to charge the highest price the market will pay, to make the best margin. The question is what that price is?
I suspect we may see a move to tiered pricing similar to what another poster here recounted as experience with a new Laurel K. Hamilton novel in the Kindle store at Amazon: the initial price was $20+, dropping over a period of a week or so to the "normal" $9.99 price. Hamilton is popular enough that some folks may well want the book badly enough right
now to pay a higher price rather than waiting for it to drop.
______
Dennis