Quote:
Originally Posted by Liviu_5
This post shows precisely one of the main reasons commercial ebooks have been such a failure until now; people just do not want to pay much for econtent so at current prices there is a huge spread (bid-ask) in the market; usually in such cases someone steps in the middle lowering the price, offering new "bells and whistles" to increase the bid and so on...
Unfortunately for ebooks this would need much lower markups on cover price by retailers and they have no incentive...Until publishers sell directly (like Baen does - very important reason for their success) or find retailers for their ebooks that take a more reasonable markup it will be very hard to increase the market for ebooks (for example in music CD baby sells mp'3 of independent artists and takes 9% of cover price for mp3's)
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Most people see ebooks as something less then the paper edition even though the content is the same. So in that case, they are not willinto to pay as much or more for the same content. And in order to have a good reading experience for your ebooks, you do NEED to purchase a portable reading device that you'd find comfortable to use to read your ebooks. And that does take more work and money then just going into the shop and buying a book. Then couple that with DRM and the hassles that one can have and you get a less then satisfactory experience.