Quote:
Originally Posted by j.p.s
It does matter. At that time, over 10 years ago, people were posting that they were expecting savings on ebooks over pbooks to render their device essentially free in less than a year or that it had already paid for itself.
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I'm not sure what alternate reality you are channeling, but it certainly isn't the reality that I lived through. People who want cheap books can get books a lot cheaper than Amazon's $9.99 price point. What they couldn't do is get NYT best seller books cheap before the paperback edition came out.
Apple didn't enter the market until Spring of 2010. The Kindle hit the market in November of 2007 (I bought one for Christmas that year to go with the Sony PRS-500 that I bought the previous year). So Amazon had some two and a half years for customers to recoup those initial $350 prices. In 2010, a new Wi-Fi only Kindle cost $139. By 2011, you could by an ad supported kindle for $79. So, agency pricing and $350 Kindles never existed at the same time.
For some reason, some people seem to think that digital books should be dirt cheap and that none of the normal expenses of producing a book should apply to eBooks. The only expense that doesn't apply to eBooks is the actual printing, binding and storage cost. Amazon actually changed the dynamics of storage cost quite a bit. Once again, if you want cheap books, you can buy them. The current indie price point for authors who produce books on a monthly basis seems to be around $3-$4 bucks.
The whole Agency pricing is to blame for eBooks not taking over the book market simply ignores a lot of dynamics with regards to the reading market in general.