Hey, Stu, welcome to MobileRead.
This topic has been kicked around a bit (here's a
link if you want to read the background
). The nutshell answer is multi-layered.
The first layer is that they claim to be (and
mostly are) aiming to price things at 20% off the current paper price -- that is 20% below hardback when it's in hardback stage, 20% below trade when it's in trade stage, and so on.
However, the rest of the layers (which complicate the matter a good deal), consist of the apparent fact that the ConnStore (Connect Store) folks don't seem to have a good way to keep track of when prices drop, and seem to have some trouble making changes to pricing and getting the changes to actually stay put for any length of time.
That is, they don't seem to have a mechanism to track when the paperback comes out, and lower the pricing appropriately. And as you can see from the above-linked thread, even when they make changes to the prices, many of them mysteriously return to the higher price-points (personally, I suspect that this is probably a situation where they make changes to one server/DB, and then a refresh from another overwrites the change; replication issues, if you will, but that's just a guess).
And the final complication is that the publishers have the final word on the pricing. So if, say, Penguin Books says that they want $25 for their edition of
Jane Eyre, then ConnStore hasn't much choice but to charge that $25. I'm not saying that happens, and this example is just a random pulled-out-of-the-air type example with no attempt at a basis in reality -- I'm just saying that the pubs can be a factor.
