Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
Some readers and a vocal group on MR oppose agency pricing, but I suspect that most readers don't care one way or the other. What they care about is getting the book they want at the price they want to pay, not how that price is calculated or how the price is distributed among publisher, retailer, and author.
I also suspect that if agency pricing was set at $2.99 and the wholesale model meant the consumer price would be higher than $2.99, most MR opponents would no longer be opponents of agency pricing, but of wholesale pricing.
What we really know is that people have determined how much they are willing to pay for an ebook and do not care how that price point is reached, only that it is reached.
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To a great extent that is why publishers want Agency pricing, they think that they have a better handle on what customers are willing to pay for books and when they are willing to pay those prices. Right now, publishers seem to have done a pretty good job at setting customer expectations that ebook prices should be in line with the price of what that book is priced in the B&M bookstores.
I find that the various MR factions tend to line up closely with traditional groups of books readers.
-You have a group of readers who never actually buy books, they only get books at the library, though they may read hundreds of books a year.
-You have other groups who mostly frequent the used book stores and will only buy books at a steep discount.
-You have groups of readers who have favorite authors and will buy the latest and greatest by those authors at hardback prices
-You have groups of readers who only read sporadically and tend to buy whatever is on the best seller list at the time.
The difference is that the traditional groups don't actively deride each other and insist that their way is the one and only true way to price books.