Amazon's $9.99 eBook Price Model is No More

[snurp85]

These publishers are clearly greedy...

On the contrary we like them very much indeed. It is low cost to us and so on.

He's telling us right now, ebooks cost us nothing to produce yet we want to charge you the same amount as if you were buying the book itself. I understand that Amazon has been selling ebooks for a loss this whole time, but wtf... a 50% price hike!!! Is $8 pure profit a bad deal for the publishers? Not including the money they save by not printing the book itself.

 

[WyomingKnott]

The companies that own the rights to publish and sell hardcopy books have every right to sell them for what they want, not for what we think the price model should be. Why should they price their major product out of existence?
On the other hand, hasn't it been established that forcing a pricing model on distributors is unlawful? As in all the fooraw about Intel giving discounts to retailers who don't sell AMD products, and overcharging those who do? If I want to buy a car for $20,000 and go out and sell it for 50 cents, it's my prerogative.
The problem with what was done here is that it is price fixing, which is against the law.
A (comparatively) small number of books are sold in E-format by different models. Publisher-free, where the author sells directly. Pay-what-you-want downloads exist for books, but music under this model is more common.

 

[WyomingKnott]

E-books do not cost "nothing to produce." A publishing house has many employees, and reads many, many books not good enough to publish to pick out the ones that they will publish. That money has to be made back, and a profit as well, or the publishers will stop reading submissions, picking good ones, editing them, and publicizing them, and switch to something profitable, like selling beans.

 

[Maxor127]

How are eBooks not just around $5? Shouldn't that be the benefit of buying an eBook? Paperbacks were only around $5 when I used to care about reading, and a quick look at Borders shows some at around $8. eBooks should be less than paperbacks, so I don't know where $10 and the ludicrous $15 are coming from.

 

[WheelsOfConfusion]

[citation][nom]WyomingKnott[/nom]The companies that own the rights to publish and sell hardcopy books have every right to sell them for what they want, not for what we think the price model should be. Why should they price their major product out of existence? [/citation]
We'll see how well the market bears their price hikes, I guess. If the price is too different from "what we think it should be," who will buy? Personally, I'm definitely not going to pay several hundreds of dollars for a Kindle and then keep paying physical-book prices for the e-books to fill it with.

 

[WyomingKnott]

[citation][nom]WheelsOfConfusion[/nom]We'll see how well the market bears their price hikes, I guess. If the price is too different from "what we think it should be," who will buy? Personally, I'm definitely not going to pay several hundreds of dollars for a Kindle and then keep paying physical-book prices for the e-books to fill it with.[/citation]
That's kind of the point - it will make the publishers happy, since they think they will sell more physical books.