Quote:
Originally Posted by jmilica
I was thinking that physical goods are something different and that in ebooks there are no transport costs etc...I mean, you can store your own books in the cloud so I presume Kobo or Amazon do the same or similar thing with "theirs" as well...
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A lot of publishers are firm believers in pricing books as high as the market will bear but that's not the whole story.
The reason why goods carry different prices in different markets relates to a lot of factors; some are not as obvious as others, like the cost of doing business in the region, which often drives up prices above where a simple currency exchange rate factor would predict.
Consumer purchasing power also factors in. Prices might be lower in countries where consumer income is lower.
Size of the target market matters; most businesses have fixed costs associated with setting up shop in a given country--things like collecting revenue, reporting sales, paying taxes, etc. If the likely audience for the product is low the fixed costs will add more to the price of the product since they can't be spread out over as large a volume.
In the case of ebooks, the same ebookstore might find itself selling the same book published by different publishers in different regions. And since most traditional publishers price their ebooks as a function off their pbook prices, that means that areas that protect pbooks are also impacting ebook pricing.