Quote:
Originally Posted by pietvo
The cost of printing and distributing pbooks may be less than is generally assumed, but there are other costs that you forget. First the handling at the bookshop. Having an inventory, the rent or other financial cost of the brick-and-mortar shop, the high cost of labor in the bookshop, and not to forget the cost of having to return the unsold copies of books are probably more than those other ones. For ebooks you don't have returns, and the ebooks can be sold at a significantly lower cost.
I think this is the wrong attitude.
|
Most of the costs you're talking about have absolutely nothing to do with the publisher. Publishers don't own bookstores.
The costs of booksellers have nothing to do with the price a publisher sets.
What you're really arguing here is that the ebook sellers are getting discounts that are too high, because if they're not bricks & mortar they don't have the expenses you talk about, and should be getting LOWER discounts than traditional booksellers. Currently, they're getting HIGHER booksellers.
So if those are the costs that concern you, then your issue is with Kindle, Kobo, etc., not with publishers.
(Now, to be fair, Kobo, with whom we've done the most business, does offer buyers reduced rates, so they cut into their own discount.)
As for returns, when I talk about the price point that will sustain ebook programs I'm talking about numbers I've worked with with ebooks. Returns aren't part of that pricing. But you should keep in mind that booksellers place larger orders for books knowing they can return unsold copies -- ebook retailers don't do the same thing. Also, booksellers don't return for hard cash -- they return for credit on future purchases.
Quote:
|
Of course publishers need to make profit but the primary focus should be the wishes of the customers. The only way for a company to survive is to deliver what the customers want, at a price that the customers feel happy about and that gives the company a reasonable profit. If you sell at a price that the customers only accept grudgingly, with a product that the customer only accepts because he has no choice (for example DRM), you will lose that customer at the first occasion that he can get a better deal. If you make your customer happy he may stay with you and give you more profit in the future.
|
But you're saying all this and dismissing your own concession that publishers need to make a profit. If readers won't accept the price publishers need to sell ebooks at, then ebooks fail, not publishers, because publishers will then continue to make nearly all their revenue from physical books.
No one has to publish ebooks; there's no government regulation forcing us to do it, and physical books continue to sell quite well (despite doomsayers' predictions, more Canadian books are being sold than ever before). If ebooks aren't going to be financially viable they'll forever be publishers' afterthoughts.
And it's important to note that to date, the overwhelming majority of the feedback we get from readers is that $8-$10 is a price they're very happy with. I didn't come up with the number range out of thin air.
As I said, we'd all love to buy everything at a lower price than what it's sold at. As a buyer, I'd love to get quality books for $5, but as a publisher, I know that if we have to list ebooks at $5, the future of books is paper. And personally, I'd rather go the more environmentally friendly route.
There has to be a middle ground between the publishers' needs and the buyers' needs. $5 might satisfy the latter, but not the former. $15 is probably the ideal price for publishers (for most books) but far too high for consumers. $8-$10 is a push for publishers, but is doable, so far people are buying ebooks at those prices and providing us good feeback.