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Originally Posted by JSWolf
One thing I think is wrong for the library to do is have automatic borrows. The borrows should be manual and if the person misses the window to borrow, then so be it. It then means that the next person on the wait list gets it sooner.
Automatic borrowing means it gets borrowed even if the person borrowing it doesn't have time to read it. If I have 4 books out with a 3-week borrow, I doubt I'd have time for a 5th. But with automatic borrow, I get that 5th book even if I don't read it. I just leave it and eventually it goes to someone else. But in 2 days it would go to someone else instead of 3-weeks.
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Kind of tough for the person who's away from the computer for a few days, or is having a power outage! That six-month hold was for nought.
I suspect that with a manual hold, most will just check out a book anyway and hope for the best, even if they're likely not to have the time. Also, and this will add up, if everyone takes advantage of the two-day window because most aren't ready to start reading a book right away, that adds two (or three, or whatever) days to the borrow. A two-weeks borrow (and my libraries are mostly two weeks) with a three-day checkout period has effectively added 20% to the borrow time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
The thing I want to know is what is the lowest price point for an eBook where the extra sales make up for the lower price.
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Price elasticity mostly doesn't work like that. Depending on the elasticity of a particular item, lowering the price might raise or lower total revenues. Obviously lowering the price will increase unit sales, but there's no guarantee that total revenues will go up (and they probably won't).
Moreover, publishers are champs at price discrimination; they maximize revenues by starting high and skimming off those buyers who'll pay a lot to get it now, and then the price will go down to get the cheaper folks who are willing to wait.
Finally, I'll bring up "fair" one more time. Fair to whom, exactly? Would cheaper ebook prices be fairer to the writer? To the publisher, who's got salaries to pay and overhead to cover? Your notion of "fair" seems really to mean "fair to me," and if you parse that, "fair to me" seems to mean, "what I think I should pay."