Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
But what if you sell 250,000 books for full price and then lower the price the to the point where people will buy another 750,000? Won't that make a larger profit or -- if we are talking about a book with a multi-million dollar advance -- a lesser loss than if the lower price was charged from the start?
However, maybe you weren't thinking that the million books were all the same titles, and were thinking that the lower prices are spread across the entire market life of the books, during which prices change. In that case, lots more variables are going to come into play. You could then be right, but I don't see how we would know it.
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That works too -- if the other 750,000 are eagerly waiting for the book to drop in price, rather than going and buying something else within minutes. There is no guarantee that they will ever so much as recheck the prices.
And if we are speaking only of the two or three books that *everyone* gets, then it is indeed better business to overcharge and reap the benefits of a lot of impatient consumers. But this argument is not and was never about only pricing the top two or three books higher -- it is about doing so as a general policy across the ebook industry. The number of books that is irreplaceable is minuscule, and if it isn't irreplaceable, it's going to get replaced.