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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Apparently, these publishers are oblivious to how many people *never* buy hardcovers, and are not switching from hardcover to ebook, but paperback to ebook.
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But these aren't the people who are buying bestsellers the day they're published, obviously. Those who, in the past, have been happy to wait a year for a book to come out in paperback won't be affected by this move.
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Insisting that their ebooks lag behind hardcover sales won't get them back the customers who buy from their competitors during the lag time, because when that 4 months is up, there's a new crop of bestsellers--and their competitors' titles are available as ebooks *now.*
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OTOH books have a degree of inelasticity - a book by Philip Roth is not the same as a book by Dan Brown, and publishers want to grab revenues from those who are willing to pay a larger sum to get a particular book without waiting.
One of the problems behind all this is that the distribution chain is geared for price changes being founded on different products. I think publishers would be happy to release a hardback at $25 and an ebook at $20 initially, then six months later they put out a trade paperback at $15 and the ebook falls to $12. The problem is that distributors and retailers have difficulty changing the price on items unless they're given a new SKU, leading to the ridiculous position at some stores where the ebook costs twice the paperback.
Of course, the
real problem is Amazon's $10 price-point for new works. Publishers are simply desperate to stop the process of $10 becoming the perceived value of a new book, because they know that Amazon isn't going to keep absorbing the losses forever.
To be honest, while I agree that it's irritating and frustrating, I have a degree of sympathy for publishers on this point. They do need to protect the future state of the market and they're being painted into a corner. The bold solution would be to put out a $20 ePub version on the day of release and then let Amazon sell a discounted Kindle version several months later. That would be war, however.