Quote:
Originally Posted by RedRoverJ
I am sure prices of eBooks CAN be dramatically reduced, but only at the expense of pBook sales. This, I feel, is the primary reason for keeping eBook prices inflated. If the savings were in eBooks, we would see much wider adoption of the format and this would negatively impact pBook sales.
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On this point, I disagree with you, and I disagree with people in publishing who share this belief.
I don't think ebook sales cut into physical books sales. I think once someone has an ereader that they use regularly, they're out of the physical book market. So if an ebook price is too high, I don't think an ebook person decides to buy the physical book instead; I think they simply choose not to buy the book at all.
But in disagreeing with you on this point, I'm also agreeing with you in that you're right about this being the thinking of some publishers. But as I said at length in my previous post, the answer isn't a $5 book, because that's simply not in the financial cards. If publishers sold nothing but ebooks, $5 would be the first ingredient in their recipe for bankruptcy.
There has to be a happy medium here. If we want ebooks to flourish, publishers have to see them as a revenue source ... and a superior revenue source to physical books. (I, for one, believe they can be.) But they're not going to see that potential with $5 books. If they set the price at $5, they're going to look at the resulting sales and say, "well, we sold some, but if we had to rely on those numbers, we'd be out of business; thank God for physical books!"
Make no mistake, even sub-$10 is a stretch for publishers at the moment, but as ebooks grow in popularity I believe that will become the magic price-point that strikes a balance between affordability for the consumer, and profitability for the publisher. Varying from that range would create too many problems for one or the other.