[bgalbrecht]

I voted that I'll wait for a drop in price, which is almost totally true, since many publisher will put ebooks on sale for a day to goose their standings in best seller lists, but there's a very limited set of authors where I don't wait for a sale. Part of this stems from buying most of my paper books (which are mostly F/SF) used from one of the best F/SF bookstores in the world (Uncle Hugo's in Minneapolis, for the curious). I tend to be a binge buyer, and buy more than I can read in a week or two, so I always have a huge TBR backlog. This makes it hard for me to justify to myself spending $10 or more on a book, and for most authors, that upper limit is probably more like $5.

My personal viewpoint on book pricing, which might not reflect how publishers and authors view book pricing, is that paper book pricing is based on timeliness and scarcity, and maybe also the cost of print runs, and that ebook pricing is based on what the market will bear without cannibalizing print too much. So hardcover is expensive, partly because it costs a buck or two more to make than trade or mass market paperback, partly because the print run is smaller and there are fewer copies available, and the price/book is higher with a smaller print run, partly because the publisher is relying on the hardcover to recoup more of the upfront costs of making a book (author advance, copyediting costs, publisher overhead), and partly because people are getting A NEW BOOK before the hoi polloi do so the hardcover buyer can use it to impress people. Trade paperbacks are cheaper to make than hardcover, but not all that much, but still have a smaller print run. Mass market has the highest print run, cheapest book printing and if it's not a MMPB only book, it's for the price conscious buyers who waited years for it to come out. And then you have the really price conscious buyers who wait until the hardcover is remaindered, or the books show up at used book stores, library sales, etc., where the price can be pretty much anywhere from a quarter to have the suggested retail price.

Ebooks, on the other hand, cost pennies per copy once the original production costs are recouped. And the current production book editing software can pretty much generate the paper editions and the various ebook editions all at once, so once any edition is created, there's hardly anything left to do. This might not be entirely true for all books, some still have layouts that might be hard to emulate in epub and Kindle formats. I suspect this is partly the rationale for holding one day sales for $1.99 or $2.99 to goose a book into bestseller status. It cuts into profits, but it may not take that many additional sales to recover the loss. Anyway, the publishers price the ebook lower than a hardcover or trade paperback because there's an expectation that large retailers are going to discount them 20% or more, so if it's a agency pricing publisher, they need to discount the ebook, or a lot of ebook or nothing readers will consider buying the book.

While I think that at the end of the sales life of a mass market paperback, the publishers ought to be thinking about cutting the ebook price in half to match the used book market, I don't expect that to ever happen. This is because the publishers don't even like to acknowledge the used book market exists, and a lot of books can be hard to find at any given used bookseller, whereas ebooks are always available. Also, if the publishers drop the price to about half MMPB, their view is that this hurts the MMPB market because the price conscious buyers will just wait longer to get a cheaper book and instead of picking up either the MMPB or ebook, which are usually the same price, they'll switch to the really cheap ebook. One thing I do sometimes see is that the print/ebook rights revert to the author, and they can be more willing to discount their ebook price from the MMPB price. And, for many authors, they've already got all they can from the publisher, they can price the ebook cheaper and still get at least as much per ebook than what they got from the publisher, and the lower price might bump their sales to boot.