Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Were you under the impression that "greed" was a minor side-issue in the decision-making process?
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I don't think it's "greed." I think it's "fear." The fear is that a book that is lent is a sale that is lost. And there might be some truth to that, particularly - and paradoxically perhaps - at the paperback level, where books are cheap.
So here's a solution or three.
(1) Allow a person who buys a book to "resell" the same book to X number of people for Y % of the original cost. The way it would work is that you would go to the web site, select your book, and obtain some kind of electronic resell credit for that particular book.
This would allow the bookseller to get some portion of the "second hand" ebook market. A buys an ebook for 10 bucks. He then "sells" a copy of the book to B for 6 bucks. He takes 4 of those bucks to pay the bookseller for the "resale" copy, which can then be downloaded by B.
The bookseller has now (1) turned his customer into someone who boosts sales of the particular book and (2) captured some of the latent resale market that is out there not being tapped by anyone.
(2) Another thing that could be done is for the bookseller to establish rebate accounts, to be used to buy more books, for people who buy a book, then recommend the book to someone else who winds up buying it. This would have to be done via some kind of "invitation" system, where the buyer uses the bookseller's site to send an invitation saying "I bought this book & recommend it to you. I paid 10 dollars, but <bookseller> will sell you a copy for 8 dollars if you click on this link." If the second customer clicks & buys, 1 buck goes into the original buyer's rebate account.
(3) Still another thing that could be done is for booksellers to offer Book Clubs where, if you join the club, you have the opportunity to buy a copy of a book if X number of members buy a copy within a set period of time. Kind of like Groupon in Chicago
http://www.groupon.com/chicago/
The point of all of these suggestions is that the key to making more money on ebook sales is not to
limit sales by controlling price, but to
multiply sales using a kind of peer to peer system that takes advantage of the communications among customers and the distribution system available for ebooks and
not available for print books.