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Originally Posted by Tarana
I wonder if the idea is that the average purchaser buys 12 books a year and doesn't care how much they pay because they only buy 12 books a year?
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Surely they know that price affects sales, and have graphs showing the relationship.
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Raising the prices will just send those folks back to the library or used book market thereby eliminating any profit to both publishers and authors.
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Sending customers to the used market increases the price of the used books, making it possible to charge more for new. I guess it maybe could be argued, with complex statistics, that this lowers publisher profits. It certainly does not eliminate them. If used book availability really is a problem for publishers, I think they might do better to reduce dumping of remaindered copies into the used marketplace.
As for libraries, they seem willing to pay far more for eBooks than paper. When I consider that my 35,000 book neighborhood library is closed for a $3.08 million renovation ($88 per book), this makes sense. With eBooks, they save the costs of library construction, utilities, staffing, etc. So it is likely much cheaper for the library to pay $90 for an eBook than to pay $20 for a paper book, when all the costs of paper are factored in. And this high library eBook price means that the publisher is making multiple dollars each times a typical eBook title is circulated.
The quality of US daily newspapers declined, in large part, because they cheapened their product. That is a lesson book publishers have hopefully learned.