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Originally Posted by rcentros
So Amazon is "evil" for discounting books to their customers?
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Do you have a citation for the word you put in quotes? I can't recall it being said here. And if I ever came close to thinking it, it has nothing to do with pricing, but rather with how they were treating low-wage workers.
Amazon's lowest wage labor pool is made up of Kindle Direct Publishing authors. A bit sad, yes, but evil, no.
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Originally Posted by rcentros
Why does Apple, Barnes & Noble and the Colluding Six think that eBooks need to cost as much as printed books?
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If a publishing executive was aware of MobileRead, he or she might reasonably believe that the eBook format is preferred by readers. However, I don't think they go by such anecdotal evidence as much as facts and figures from marketing surveys. And based on those they set the prices.
But is it really true that the publishers want to set the price of eBooks and paper books at the same level? To find out, check web sites of publishers that sell their books directly. If you check out a few titles here, you might be surprised at the eBook to paper price ratio a publisher chose when it was totally under their control:
http://books.simonandschuster.com/bestsellers
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Originally Posted by rcentros
It's the nature of the beast -- so why don't publishers factor that into their prices? Pure greed?
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Why don't readers pay a penny more than the price on a book label? Is that greed? Why should a publisher leave any more more on the table than I do?
If Hachette made life-saving drugs, or food staples, I would see some moral responsibility to keep down prices. But I do not need books to survive. This is especially true because I have freedom to read any book I want through library borrowing, including inter-library loan. So the harm to the public of high book prices is, it seems to me, no more than a transient feeling of impatience. It seems to me they have much more responsibility to their employees, authors, and maybe even some stockholders (like pension funds) than to their customers.
Average publisher profits margins are much lower than for Microsoft or Apple, but I don't see people asking why Apple needs to sell an iPad for so much. The answer, I think, is that Apple has no more or less moral right to its money than do its customers.