Quote:
Originally Posted by kjk
Hardware manufacturers of eBook readers are all onboard with the marketing message of "digital books are cheaper than physical books"-since it helps sell hardware. The jury is out whether anyone asked the publishers
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Currently the major publishers have not reduced their prices, they are still getting about 50% of the list price back from retailers (including Amazon) and they are typically charging hardback rates for the ebooks. What they are afraid of is that Amazon will stop deeply discounting new and bestseller ebooks and readers will then stop buying from publishers who don't reduce their list price to sane levels. Note that a discount selling price of $9.99 implies that publishers "should" in the long term expect perhaps $8-9 per ebook, i.e. a list price of about $16-18.