Fahrenheit 451

[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by JDK1962

S&S should have tried an experiment: releasing the e-book of Fahrenheit 451 at $9.99, and on the same day, releasing the e-book of The Illustrated Man or Something Wicked This Way Comes at $0.99. Then at the end of a month, see which one has returned more money to them.

Maybe they'd learn something about backlist pricing. Or have some actual evidence for their current pricing policy. Because trying to price something at $9.99 when the paperback is available for $0.01 seems kinda stupid to an ignorant layman like myself.

I've been looking for Alice Walker's The Color Purple for several months. I noticed in the recent Kindle sale it was $2.99 -- and that was the first time I'd seen it available. I snapped it up, and I have to think I'm not the only one.

It's back to $9.99 now. I hope the publisher is watching the numbers...

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Fbone

The paperback is $6.99.

A $3 ebook premium.

Different publisher. So that doesn't count. The eBook is from Simon & Schuster where they have a trade paperback available for more then the eBook.

[fafaforza]

I'm kind of surprised at the Bradbury's stance on ebooks. One of the themes that I got from the book was that it doesn't matter what medium a book is written on. The information within can be carried on in other formats, such as one's memory. So it isn't the medium, but the content itself, that is important.

So why would it matter that it's an eBook, unless he likens eBooks to the fourth wall somehow.

[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

This has kind of been my theory on the pricing of a lot of e-books. The point of selling books is profit, not number sold. And for a lot of these books, you would have to have a *huge* increase in demand to see a corresponding increase in profits. And I don't think you would see this with many authors.

...

Given that books aren't all sold at once, the best profit-maximizing approach is something like what the publishers already do: change pricing over time.

I agree with you on this one, and IMHO, the publishers should be viewing it as setting a price point to compete with used paper books. However, I think that publishers won't set a price point to compete with used books any time soon, for two reasons. First, the market for new ereaders isn't saturated yet, and the publisher view all the new ereader customers as people willing to pay full price for "new" ebooks, because they don't know when ebooks have been released for several years. Second, the publishers know that lowering the price of older works can cause competition with new books, and since they make most of their money on new books, they don't want their old books to compete with their new ones.

If what I read recently is true, and the cost of producing really small print runs of trade paperbacks is under $10, we'll be seeing the publishers keeping old backlist books of big name authors in print in trade paperback just so they can justify keeping the price of the ebooks at the $10-15 price range. Bradbury's probably got several books that are commonly read in high school, so they'll definitely get enough paper sales per year to keep them in print and keep the ebook price high.