[charleski]

Originally Posted by rixte

Your 'consistency' argument is missing crucial elements.

First, the in-store factor - new paperback release tables. The physical memory jog of seeing a book that was mentioned.

Right now for ebooks, there's usually fanfare when something new is released (I get email from ebook vendors ranging from Amazon to BoB and Fictionwise) but there's not follow-up 1-2 years later.

No, it's not missing any elements at all.

Stores are perfectly free to improve on their marketing techniques, and once windowing is set in place will probably set up a 'new discount releases' section just as you describe. There's no reason to do so now simply because there is no windowing.

But I also think that mandated selling prices and 'no sales price allowed situations' are annoying - it annoys me for physical hardware when Sony does it, it annoys me when Apple does it and it annoys me even more that Macmillan is planning on doing it for non-physical mediums.

I think agency pricing is bad for the industry as well. It's happening because Amazon got too greedy and attempted to take over. I can only hope that in the future Amazon manages to amend its ways and restore the element of trust necessary for the wholesale/retail mechanism.

Originally Posted by Barcey

I personally think that the windowed pricing is an artifact of physical books sales and is not necessary when selling electronic copies. It made sense to drop the price to get rid of your physical inventory and then introduce cheaper physical copies after you'd recovered costs (in the gravy zone). I don't have a problem with the windowed pricing but I do think it's stupid and will only drive more people to alternatives.

Windowed pricing was never an artifact, it's a crucial sales tool used in many industries. Some people will pay more to get something quickly and others are willing to trade-off a cheaper price for a wait. This has worked for decades. It's got absolutely nothing to do with inventory.

On the contrary, it would be stupid to price the product at the same level throughout its life. Those who were willing to pay more end up paying less and those who wanted to pay less end up having to pay more.

There are no 'alternatives', unless you don't really care about books much and don't mind if authors stop writing.

Originally Posted by Alisa

What's changed is that out off all the books we tell ourselves we'll get when they come out in paperback, we forget a good deal of them. Or we get them from a friend or the library. More and more libraries have ebooks. The new releases have a waiting list but I'll just put myself on the list at this point. I'll likely get the book before the price drops. We find them used. They could pick up a lot of sales at $10 that they likely would have lost with people waiting for $7. They'd get more money sooner. It maximizes their marketing, too.

Maybe there's scope for a middle segmentation-point at the $10 mark, though I suspect the ebook market is simply too small right now to accommodate it. Once it grows I'm sure the publishers are more than willing to play around with different prices and windows to find the best match.

A flat-price model is just stupid though and leads to complaints as seen here. Publishers lose money from those who would have been willing to pay more to get the book as soon as possible and end up charging more to those who can't pay as much - that's insane.

Baen sells ebooks at a $15 window, and what's worse, these ARCs are unproofed and full of errors - will you be organising a boycott of them as well?