Quote:
Originally Posted by kennyc
But that is just silly. The price should be based on the cost of doing business which has got to be less for digital than for hardback or paperback.
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But that
is the cost of doing business. A hardback book costs what, a dollar to print and bind in quantity? The costs of physical distribution, stock management and retail largely come out of the 50%+ that goes to the distribution chain, and sure, retailers should feel free to discount that as much as they can to win business. Publishers need to make around $12.50 on a new book to recoup the costs they put into production (including the author's advance) as quickly as possible.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xenophon
Alternatively, these publishers could look at a successful existing solution over at Webscriptions and Baen.
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I absolutely agree that Baen is a shining star in the world of publishing and Jim Baen was both bold and visionary. I'm certain that other genre publishers would do well to learn from his approach to ebooks. OTOH, he understood his market very well and took advantage of the particular nature of the of the genre fiction niche, but I'm just not sure how well it would function for general works. For example, political memoirs don't really work the same as science-fiction: you can't serialise them into an endless succession and the sort of person who snapped up
An Inconvenient Truth is unlikely to want to buy
Going Rouge, whereas Webscriptions works because if you like one book from them it's a reasonable bet that you'll like the others.