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Originally Posted by Cinisajoy
As to your last part, instead of saying publishers are living in the past, perhaps you should be telling the buyers to quit buying ebooks at those prices.
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Based on (admittedly somewhat dodgy) sales figures of physical books vs. ebooks, most people don't pay the prices for ebooks.
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Here is the thing: if I am selling something at $20 and have people willing to pay it, I really don't care if the one that wants it for $2 doesn't buy it. No, I am not going to reduce my price because the one thinks a person's time is worth nothing.
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That's not the point. The point is that with zero cost to "print" another ebook, if you lower the price to $10 and sell four times the units, you make a lot more money. If you lower it to $5 and sell ten times the units, you make even more. You might even be able to drop the price to $2 and sell fifty times as many units and really make a killing (assuming the author doesn't get a fixed fee per unit, but instead gets a percentage).
Games and music have shown this is
exactly what happens when the price is dropped dramatically. Publishers should do the same sort of sales that Steam and GOG do on older titles. So, basically, after a year or so, the e-book price should drop to 20-40% of the price on release date. Sure, you might lose some money due to people waiting to buy, but you'll likely make it back with the extra people buying who would never consider it at full price.
And, based on my eReaderIQ list of 134 books, publishers pretty much never discount ebooks except for those very few that seem to constantly be part of Kindle Daily Deals. None of the books on my list have dropped more than 8% in over a year. The list pretty well represents a good cross-section, too, as far as genre and publishers go, with the exception no romance or juvenile.