Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
I never said that Amazon selling ebooks at a loss was a losing proposition for Hachette. That's just your misrepresentation of what I said. However, Amazon setting a price point in the public's mind that devalues ebooks is a big issue for all the major publishers and what they have been fighting against for several years. Of course, Amazon's new demand that publishers foot the bill for Amazon selling ebooks at a loss is a pretty big issue as well.
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So now we get back to this ridiculous idea that selling ebooks at a reasonable price devalues them. So if en ebook is $14.99 I value it (but don't buy it), but if it is $9.99 I don't? Who decides what price constitutes a devaluation? What this disingenuos argument seeks to do is conditon readers to paying old print book prices for ebooks. EBooks came into a well established market of Paper Books. Hard Covers, better quality, first released, and much more expensive. Mass Market Paperbacks, much cheaper but a delayed release and much more fragile than a hardcover, and sometimes an in-between edition. All of a sudden EBooks appear. More durable than a Hard Cover and much more so than a paperback. Orders of magnitude cheaper to produce. Hence the "devaluation" argument. It does not address costs of production or any other valid consideration. It simply says "If we sell at a lower price they won't value it". What a load of garbage.