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Originally Posted by coleman
You can reduce cost all you want, but there's no realistic way the marginal cost of a physical book will ever approach that of an eBook.
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What does that have to do with the price of potato chips in Peoria? Price is only closely related to variations in cost when there is competition. If B&N gets their costs below Amazon's, then I expect to see a price drop across the board. However, if the NY Jets (American football) cuts the cost of running the team by 50%, I don't expect season ticket prices to drop. What am I going to do, buy Giants tickets instead? I don't think so. There is one and only one source for Jets tickets.
The only real competition-related pressure on publisher's book prices is the fact that they, as a whole, compete with other entertainment venues for the market's entertainment budget. Beyond that, it's between booksellers for the same titles (or an aggregate of current titles) in the reseller market.
If the latest masterpiece by S. Gary Horrormeister is $30, the fact that some tawdry piece of crap by Wanna B. Hackdude is $15, is going to exert very little pricing pressure on Horrormeister's publisher. If you want to read Horrormeister's work, you're going to pay his publisher's price. If they switch their entire catalog to all digital tomorrow, there is no market incentive to drop the "new release" price below the current hardcover price. Why should they? The market has already demonstrated that it's willing to pay that price for a new release.
Quote:
Originally Posted by coleman
What that makes me wonder more about is how authors negotiate rights with an electronic company. Do they get % of sales, or do they sell the right to sell 50K copies, thus making a sort of electronic run, sell rights per years, or in perpetuity?
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Currently, e-rights are most often sold for periods of time, though that period might sometimes be "in perpetuity." As for the compensation, that's always negotiable. It might be a flat fee, or it might be a per-copy percentage. I don't think a fixed number of sales makes sense for either the author or the publisher. Sales might never reach the terminal value.