Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
I believe Indie ebook pricing for fiction is an accurate indication of the correct pricing of all fiction ebooks if protecting the market for paper books is not a consideration.
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I find your terminology a bit odd. There is no "correct" pricing. There is the price enough people will pay. Nor do I place much stock in the notion of "protecting the market for paper books" anymore. The prices (from the Big 5/6) are nearly the same as they always have been since long before "propping up paper" became a thing. Ebooks were expensive before publishers ever became worried that people might actually
want to buy them.
There are clearly enough people who value ebooks enough to support the Big 5's current pricing of them in my opinion. It's that simple for me. If there weren't, the prices would change. They may be bullheaded, but they're not stupid. They don't want to NOT make money on ebooks in order to prop up paper. They simply want to continue to make money on both. And it seems the market is allowing them to do so.
There may be a bit of a "centering" of ebook pricing over the years between indie pricing and tradpub pricing, but the current indie pricing of ebooks is never going to be the "norm" (no matter what happens on the paper side of the business) in my opinion. The ebook price is always going to very close to a title's paper counterpart's price (so long as it has a paper counterpart). As it should be, in my opinion.