Quote:
Originally Posted by fugazied
Bottom line is that it is not unreasonable to expect e-books to be cheaper than paperbacks. It is not. Authors suggesting that it is, deserve what they get, and trust me it won't be pretty, book reading consumers aren't fools.
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But authors deserve to get paid for their work, and shouldn't see a cut in their salaries because of dropping prices.
Now if that means prices can be cheaper due to lower costs, and the authors still get their same cut (make the same dollar amount per copy sold), then that's fine. Lower the prices.
The problem is that's unlikely to happen as lower price per unit will be less money coming into publishers coffers, and they'll probably lower the cut authors (especially non-established authors with little negotiating power) get to try to keep their income streams up.
Example, to just make up numbers-- say currently a book sells for for $10. Say the Publisher gets $7 of that (70%) and the author $3 (30%). If the ebook version goes for $5 the publisher probably isn't going to take $2 so the author still gets $3 for the copy sold. They'll take their 70% (3.50) and the author will get his/her 30% which is $1.50--and all of a sudden their profit per book is down 50%. Before they got $3 per copy of their work sold, now they're getting $1.50.
So that's why I feel for authors. They're doing just as much work writing books as before, and have the very real threat of making less money for that work than before as we go to digital content and people expect to pay less than they do for physical versions of the SAME content--not to mention much greater piracy costing sales.
But most people don't care about the authors and only care about saving money on their end, and feel e-books aren't "worth" as much as physical books. Which I can see as many see spending the money as paying to own something tangible, vs. paying to enjoy the content (like you would with a $12 movie ticket etc.). And as much as that needs to change for digital content to not be a huge negative for produces of books, music, movies etc., I don't think it will.
So again, I'm glad I'm not a creative person, as this digital revolution would be scary to someone who's career was generating such content and getting people to pay a fair price for it to make a living on, and become rich if you have the talent.