Quote:
Originally Posted by Hellmark
This part I don't get at all. Why should it be more expensive? It doesn't cost any more to produce (arguably cheaper), and the person is not getting anything tangible, plus have to deal with DRM that makes it difficult or impossible to do what they could with a paper book.
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More expensive than what? I think the objection is that of Hachette's president, who is unhappy at Amazon's $9.99 becoming the de facto price for most ebooks.
There will be per-book limits on how cheap an ebook can be. There will be costs to acquire a title, edit, copy edit, and proofread it, and mark it up for production, plus an allocated share of general corporate overhead, whether or not a book is actually printed, bound, warehoused and distributed. Those costs will set a lower limit on the price an ebook
can be and still be economically published, depending upon the perceived size of the market for the book. (Obviously, a best seller expected to sell hundreds of thousands of copies can be priced less than a reference volume with a market of a few hundred specialists.)
Publishers thinking this way are seeing lower costs because they don't have to print, bind, warehouse and ship a physical book, and want to see more of the price flow to their bottom line. Well, fine. Price that way, and see how many people buy the ebook.
The fact that value is relative, and something is worth as much as someone else is willing to pay for it is widely forgotten, even among those who should be most aware of it.
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Dennis