Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
Agency pricing from the publisher's bookstores will be the norm in 2017.
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If it's at the publisher's store, there's no agent involved. Publisher sets the price & gets all the profit.
I don't think undiscountable ebooks are going to be majority-standard in a few years. While some countries have undiscountable pbooks, they also have used and loaner pbook markets, and the hard facts of physics to deal with: any one store can only carry so many books, so they can compete on selection, if not price.
With selection near-infinite (hypothetically) for an ebook store, and used & long-term loaned books unavailable (legitimately), there'll be too much pressure to make prices flexible.
Stores won't want to shut out customers who would buy at 20% off. Apple is happy to have take-it-or-leave-it prices because they want to focus on hardware, not content; other bookstores want to be able to offer seasonal bargains and other specials to draw in customers.
What I hope happens is a standard of 70% of list price being the wholesale standard for ebooks, and stores can discount all they want, as long as they pay the provider 70% of the SRP. There's no reason to have the wholesale price be 50%, because the store isn't carrying anything like the risks that pbook stores carry. (I could hope for 85%--the Smashwords model--but I know the difference between "a dream" and "a delusion.")