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Old 10-09-2006, 12:52 PM   #3
NatCh
Gizmologist
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Location: Republic of Texas Embassy at Jackson, TN
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Unfortunately, the publishers are the ones who set the prices on the e-books. Yes, Sony gets a cut, but the pubs basically tell them how much they'll get a cut of.

That being said, it will be interesting to see what happens when Amazon's Kindle comes out. I imagine that the prices will be fairly similar, since the only wiggle room the re-seller gets is their own cut. I don't imagine that the pubs will feel any particular pressure to sell to one retailer any more cheaply than another.

On the other hand, the question we could look at right now is: how much is MobiPocket (which now belongs to Amazon) selling the same book for?

I randomly selected The Lincoln Lawyer, by Michael Connelly ('cause I found it on both sites almost immediately). Mobipocket has it for $6.99, and Connect has it for $14.36, or about twice as much.

For another comparison, McCaffrey's Dragons Fire (presently only available in hardback) is $14.36 at Connect, and $17.95 at Mobipocket .

So I'd say you may have a point about the paperback thing, but you also may get a better deal during hardback stage from Connect.

I say "may," because I don't consider this to be a representative survey/comparison of the two sites.


Some things to consider about pbook pricing. When you look at cover price in a bookstore, that's essentially 50% higher than what the book cost the retailer. It used to be a 40% mark-up when I was in high-school, but apparently that's increased (which says some interesting things about how those cover prices have increased in the same time frame, but I digress).

So when Borders or B&N offer that new hardback at 10% off, they're selling it for 90% of 150% of what they paid for it, or a 35% mark-up over their cost. When Amazon does the same thing for 20% of the cover price, they're basically selling it for 20% over their cost. They can get away with that because they have less overhead, not having to run a retail operation as well as what amounts to a distribution operation.

E-books are a whole different ballgame. We've talked a lot about what differences the non-physical nature of e-books make to that whole process, but we don't really know, and the pubs aren't telling, assuming they've figured it out (a reasonable assumption, I think).

The practical upshot is that the pubs still set the price they'll sell "copies" to a retailer for, and they may not want to "compete" with their well understood paper product, by way of a scary new electronic product that they're still suspicious is going to rob them blind through piracy.

That's all very complicated, and I'm sure that there's much more to it than I've touched on, or would even pretend to grasp. That's actually my point, I guess: that this is a lot more complicated than it appears at first, or even 15th, glance.
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