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Originally Posted by pwalker8
Hum, let me pull up two recent best sellers
Walter Isaacson's Leonardo da Vinci (published Oct 17th, 2017)
Ron Chernow's Grant (published Oct 10th, 2017)
The paper price for the da Vinci book is $21, the Kindle price, $17
The paper price for the Grant book is $24, the Kindle price, $20
In both cases, the kindle price is basically at the discount price for the hardback. So I don't see a price discrimination against the ebook version, unless you are simply arguing that ebook prices should be much cheaper.
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I am horrified by these ebook prices, and I am far from alone. Why on earth would I want to pay $20 or $17 for an ebook when I can buy Indie ebooks as good or better for a fraction of the price? To me this is the case with the vast majority of books. There are very rare exceptions where I really want to read a particular book. The authors I used to read before agency have all been replaced by Indies whose books are as good or in some cases better, with the exception of John Sandford. But I still refuse to pay the ridiculous publisher set price for his books, which I read through other (legal) means.
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Originally Posted by pwalker8
Choosing price points for anything is more of an art than a science, but we do see a nice experiment in pricing going on.
I just bought book 5 of J.A. Sutherland's Alexis Carew series. Kindle price, either $5 or free if you have kindleunlimited. The paperback price is $18. Sutherland is an indie author and the paper version is via Amazon's Publishing Platform. I would predict that he's not going to sell many paper copies.
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I agree with your prediction. His paper book is at Big 5 type prices. Amazon, unlike the Big 5, have priced the ebook at a reasonable level. The difference, of course, is that Amazon doesn't care about the ebook taking sales from the paper book. Or perhaps they even want to positively encourage ebook adoption. And, so far as ebooks are concerned, these are the prices the Big 5 must compete with, fantasies about all books being special snowflakes notwithstanding.
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Originally Posted by pwalker8
With iTunes, you have a tiered pricing model. You can buy individual songs at $1.29, or the whole album at a much lower price than all the songs totaled. The album price costs about what the cd cost at Amazon. So, it seems to me that the big Publishers already are following the current music industry's lead in pricing. Digital media cost is fairly close to physical media cost. Movies are priced the same way, it cost the same for a digital copy of the movie as it does for a Blu-Ray copy.
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Firstly, those industries have both moved on to the point where subscription services are a thriving model. But, of course, Amazon is producing its own TV and Movie content, as are Netflix and others. In the long term this will likely have an effect in those industries not dissimilar to the Indie Book market effect on Publishing. Amazon, Netflix and more innovative players have been frustrated by the attitudes and greed of the old players, and are not wedded to their legacy business practices. It is little wonder that they are taking the first steps towards the longer term goal of breaking the stranglehold on content of these "rights-holders". I'm not aware of what is currently happening in the music industry. The fact that Amazon and others are not producing their own music, at least as far as I'm aware, implies that perhaps the record labels have reached some sort of accommodation with them, at least for the moment.
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Originally Posted by pwalker8
Now perhaps you are arguing that the published missed the boat by not selling the ebook versions directly. Some either do have or once had their own ebook stores. Baen has it's own monthly ebook bundle and has since 1999, which if we actually had sales figures, might give some interesting information. I do suspect that the fact that Baen ebooks are now available on Amazon probably is an indication though. I would suggest that most customers would rather shop somewhere than has all the books available, rather than go from publisher to publisher.
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Of course five (or six at the time) different major publisher online stores was never going to cut it. Had they foreseen what was going to happen they could have cooperated on a single online store featuring all of their books. They seemed to have no trouble conspiring against Amazon later, so this would not have been beyond them. Structured and implemented intelligently it would have stood a much better chance of surviving any anti-trust concerns than their later obvious price-fixing conspiracy did.