Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
OR....
It was the same windowing that publishers have used "forever". Hardback comes out at highest price. Then, later, an expensive soft cover (but less than the hardback) comes out. Then, lastly, the cheap paperback book is released. That was how the business worked.
And it's not two people selling lemonade. It's two retailers selling the producer's product. Same actual product.
At stake was one of the publisher's customers devaluing the product for all of the publisher's customers...which comes to devalue the product for the publisher.
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I was perfectly happy with the original wholesale model, where the publishers were charging the same wholesale price for either paper edition or ebook, and the retailers choosing to pick their own profit margins (or loss leaders) for both paper and ebook editions. If the ebook price was too high for me, I just waited for the price drop when the cheaper paper editions were released. There were a few cases where that didn't happen, when the HC publisher owned the ebook rights but not the mass market paperback rights, and they left the ebook price at parity with the HC.
It shouldn't even have mattered to the publisher whether the consumer bought paper or ebook, because the wholesale price was the same. With agency pricing the publishers have publicly acknowledged they are receiving lower payments on ebooks than they are for the paper edition (at least during the HC window). If the costs of producing the ebook and the paper edition are comparable, and the publishers want to recoup the upfront costs (like advances, editing and preproduction costs) quickly, then with agency pricing they need to steer more early book purchases to paper. As an ebook consumer, that worries me.
And realistically even though Amazon was discounting most NYT bestsellers to $9.99 in ebook, they weren't discounting all ebooks in the HC window to $9.99, and all the ebook retailers were doing some discounting. They had to, because Wal-Mart, Target, Sam's Club and Costco, among others, were doing discounting of the same titles in paper. Sure, the unnamed retailer (aka Amazon) was putting pressure to keep (e)book prices down, but it had a lot of competition exerting the same pressure.
Finally, because paper books are priced by the retailer and only indirectly by the publisher, I ran into a lot of cases where the paper book was cheaper than the ebook, often by several dollars, because the retailer was discounting and the publisher wasn't. When that happens, I just don't buy their product at all.