Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemurion
I agree with you - ebooks should be cheaper, and selling a million ebooks for $3.99 a pop could indeed be more profitable than selling a few hundred thousand mass market paperbacks. One problem right now is that if you sell three hundred thousand paperbacks (a huge number by today's standards) you will likely only sell 15,000 ebooks and that's a big seller in ebooks.
That which you only sell to 5% of your market does not give you economy of scale.
As for selling used paperbacks, I find very few places will give half cover for a used paperback - it's more like 10-15% and they try to sell it for half.
Still, your initial points are dead on.
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Well yeah those are huge unreasonable sales numbers at the moment. We ebook readers, are after all, are early adopters. I gave those numbers mainly because ebooks in my opinion have a much higher change of getting 1 million sales, even on otherwise less popular titles, because they can be both cheaper to distribute (thus potentially cheaper to purchase) and much easier to buy.
As for the economies of scale. The point was (and I see I made it poorly) that with ebooks you don't need to sell alot to reach the benefits of economies of scale, lower costs of production, to be able to sell at a cheaper price, thus make more sales, thus ultimately make more profit. With ebooks there is no problem of material costs going up or down depending on circumstances, maximum profit potential is going to base solely on finding the price sweet spot (and of course selling a good book).
Finally for the second hand market, its less about being able to resell your purchased books, but more about buying books at half original price. Being a gamer, its even worse, often they buy games at 10% original price and resell the game for 95% new price.