MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Classic B&N ebooks still more expensive than Kindle. Will they lower prices?

llreader · 11-19-2009, 07:00 AM

I don't really know what the arrangements are. I do know that there was differential pricing in the music industry (where one label was underselling to Amazon to try to break a percieved iTunes monopoly).

Of course, a lot of the music industry works on a percentage basis. My understanding is that authors, at least, get a fixed amount from the sales of books. I don't know what the publishers get, and there is the complicated issue of overprinting and dealing with remaindered copies returned from bookstores, all things that electronic books don't have. Essentially an ebook is a single copy and a license to sell all you want - no overstock, no remainders, no shortages. This is a huge headache removed for publishers and distributors (but I digress).

As far as 20% discounts and that sort of thing, that is on the bookseller. They are loss leaders - the seller eats some of their profits to get customers into the store. These sales don't have any effect on the money that the publisher and the author get from the book (as far as I am aware).

It would be interesting to hear from someone in the business. The person I know who knows the most about all this is on a book tour now, so I can't ask him.

More interesting is the conditoins that publishers might put on eretailers to allow them to sell their books. Are they not allowed to undercut the price of the pbook by more than a certain margin? Are they required to make the ebook as expensive, or more, than the hardcover until a paperback version comes out? I don't know, and these agreements, I imagine, can vary by publisher. I can see publishers not wanting $1 ebooks killing their pbook market, especially when they have just invested in printing 25,000 copies and have nowhere to put them. I imagine they are also afraid that very popular books (like the new Stephen King) are going to get ripped and posted as a torrent before the pbook is even in stores. One of the reasons that DVDs don't come out until a few months after a movie is released, when the in-theatre profits have basically dried up. It would be bad if people stayed home and rented the movie for $2. Disaster if they just downloaded a rip for free.

11-19-2009, 07:00 AM	#45
llreader Mesmerist Posts: 331 Karma: 506558 Join Date: Sep 2009 Location: Spain Device: PRS-600 Silver. Much nicer than I expected.	I don't really know what the arrangements are. I do know that there was differential pricing in the music industry (where one label was underselling to Amazon to try to break a percieved iTunes monopoly). Of course, a lot of the music industry works on a percentage basis. My understanding is that authors, at least, get a fixed amount from the sales of books. I don't know what the publishers get, and there is the complicated issue of overprinting and dealing with remaindered copies returned from bookstores, all things that electronic books don't have. Essentially an ebook is a single copy and a license to sell all you want - no overstock, no remainders, no shortages. This is a huge headache removed for publishers and distributors (but I digress). As far as 20% discounts and that sort of thing, that is on the bookseller. They are loss leaders - the seller eats some of their profits to get customers into the store. These sales don't have any effect on the money that the publisher and the author get from the book (as far as I am aware). It would be interesting to hear from someone in the business. The person I know who knows the most about all this is on a book tour now, so I can't ask him. More interesting is the conditoins that publishers might put on eretailers to allow them to sell their books. Are they not allowed to undercut the price of the pbook by more than a certain margin? Are they required to make the ebook as expensive, or more, than the hardcover until a paperback version comes out? I don't know, and these agreements, I imagine, can vary by publisher. I can see publishers not wanting $1 ebooks killing their pbook market, especially when they have just invested in printing 25,000 copies and have nowhere to put them. I imagine they are also afraid that very popular books (like the new Stephen King) are going to get ripped and posted as a torrent before the pbook is even in stores. One of the reasons that DVDs don't come out until a few months after a movie is released, when the in-theatre profits have basically dried up. It would be bad if people stayed home and rented the movie for $2. Disaster if they just downloaded a rip for free.