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Originally Posted by darryl
Thanks. Point taken. Since I tend to read mainly (but not exclusively) fiction my comments tend to focus on fiction without explicitly saying so. What I would call serious non-fiction (from which I exclude self-help books, celebrity biographies and the like) is in a somewhat different position to the market for fiction. I don't pretend to be entirely sure how this segment of the market has been changed by self-publishing, at least so far. Certainly not as radically as the market for fiction has been changed.
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Books, music and movies are alike in that the blockbusters tend to carry the industry. Where most of the "ebook sales down 17% from last year" miss the boat (other than the obvious, it's all estimated numbers since no one releases actual sales figures) is that book sells year over year tend to be driven by big sellers, so you have to look at what the big sellers are, to make sure it's an apple to apple comparison.
To a great extent, that is also true in the fiction world. Discover-ability rules. You aren't going to sell jack if no one knows the book exists. Certainly, there is a group of readers, such as yourself, who are more focused on price than author, but name authors still tend to drive sells. It's not that different from grocery stores where some people buy generics, but most tend to buy name brands.
The book price model (hardback for a year, followed by paper) has been a fairly successful price model from the stand point of maximizing profit, which is generally what people tend to want to do. It's worked pretty well over the last 50 years.
We are currently seeing an experiment of the subscription model for ebooks verses the sales model. We are also seeing an interesting experiment in ebook prices, as various authors release their books as ebooks at various prices points. Sutherland's price point of $5 is a lot closer to the publisher backlist price points than some of the earlier $1 price point. This is what I tend to expect, the market moving to a price point that maximizes the profit. It's also getting pretty close to the publisher price point ($8 ) for mid-tier authors.