Quote:
Originally Posted by Pajamaman
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Most ebook reports seem to focus only on the US market, so they interpret a drop in US sales as a drop in total consumption when it might only be a shift away from US publishers or retailers.
Other reports on internet spending have shown a big shift away from US products and retailers in favour of UK ones since the pound crash last year, so maybe something similar happened for ebooks.
Although georestrictions and retailer walled gardens make it more difficult simply to choose to buy from the UK instead of the US, there is still an effect on the competitiveness of books priced in US dollars which have to compete with books by UK publishers priced in pounds, as the UK publishers now have more margin to play with.
From what I see most self-publishers and small US publishers seem to price in US dollars and rely on the retailer or aggregator to convert to other currencies. Big publishers take a different approach and price for each market. The difference in approaches was clear to me when New Zealand added 15% GST to ebooks last year: while most of the big publishers absorbed the extra cost and maintained their price points, the price of self-published ebooks increased 15% overnight.
Before the pound crashed last year, a book by a UK publisher priced at £4.99 would be roughly equivalent to $7.99 in US dollars, but now it is closer to $5.99. So anyone pricing their books in US dollars has either had to drop their prices significantly or lose competitiveness to UK publishers.