Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
Profit is not the relevant factor. Profits are great. More companies should make them. What I find interesting here is that it seems the Big 5 have largely been setting ebook prices at an inflated level so as to retard their growth in sales and divert customers to print books, even though they make less profit from the sale of a print book. The purpose apparently is to preserve their legacy business model. I hasten to add that this is only my interpretation of the situation, which is shared by some but certainly not all. If this is the case, then the Big 5 would prefer that you buy a paper book, even though they make less profit. But if you do opt to buy an ebook at the higher price, then they make a correspondingly greater profit. The only way they lose in such a scenario is if people don't buy the books at all. This was merely an observation. It is not the fact that they are making a profit or how much profit that is relevant. What is relevant is what I consider to be the artificial inflation of the price. It is the price to be looked at, not the profit. And the pricing of the alternate formats is prima facie an indication that the price has been inflated, at least imho. In this case there are other indications which seem to point to this also.
I strongly agree with you that the content is what is important, and we simply have the same content in different packages. It is at this point, how the packaging should affect the price, that we differ. As I understand it your view is that the price should be the same or higher for an ebook (as opposed to a print book) because it is the characteristics of an ebook that you value more, to the point where you are not interested in buying print books. I am also not interested in buying print books and I also highly value the characteristics of an ebook. However, my view is that the lower costs associated with an ebook mean that the price should be lower than for an ebook, despite the fact that I value this format over and above the print format. In fact, it would seem to be logical that the costs associated with producing a particular format are the first things looked at when setting a price.
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Where is the proof that the Big 5 is inflating ebook prices so people will buy paper books?
Did they actually say this or are you making an assumption?
Or are people willingly paying their prices for ebooks?
Not only that but are you aware that the big 5 do discount their ebooks once in a while.
Dan Brown's Inferno was $1.99 on December 25, 2013.
It was 6 months old at the time and I picked up The Da Vinci Code free.
As of today it is 17.72 for hardback and 9.99 for ebook.