
Do you own trees? - jmorin007
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/do-you-own-tree.html
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shimon
Provocative article. But I don't think the fact that book publishers price
ebooks and paper books the same is about protecting printing plants. It's
actually about protecting a distribution advantage, which _is_ a core part of
the publishing business.

The Amazon kindle is a grab at the book distribution business. Amazon's goal
seems to be making the Kindle like iTunes+iPod for books. With iTunes, music
publishers are becoming increasingly dependent on a single store for a major
chunk of their sales. It's plausible that one day soon, iTunes will have
serious leverage in promoting songs and shaping the tastes of music consumers.
Needless to say, this would be extremely painful for the studios.

Similarly, if Amazon can help you find the books you want, and sell them to
you, and deliver them to you, what value do publishers add at all? Publishers
deliver value by selecting, developing, and promoting books. If the captive
Kindle audience gets big enough, what is left to publishers? Copy edit a book
and wholesale it to Amazon? That may be a business but it's not publishing as
we know it today; the margins are vastly smaller.

Owning the distribution channel would be tremendously lucrative, which is why
Amazon is happy taking a loss on each Kindle book they sell. The publishers
are justified in fearing it, but they'd be better served by developing a
Kindle alternative that makes both them and their end users happy than sitting
on their hands and pretending nothing's changing.

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technoguyrob
Not to mention, there are a lot of people who don't care about the medium, but
rather the price (e.g., college students). I know if an e-book was priced $8
versus the $10 paper version, I'd go with the $8 for pretty much any book. It
wouldn't make sense to NOT have an ebook option, but it also wouldn't make
sense financially to price it below the paper version. Finally, although I can
see reasons for pricing it above the paper version (you have features like
search, copy and paste, etc.), I think many people would find this absurd.
Hence, the only remaining option is to price them at the same cost as the
paper version. Clearly, any of the other options are possible, but the reasons
listed here are, I think, valid for not doing so.

~~~
Herring
> It wouldn't make sense to NOT have an ebook option, but it also wouldn't
> make sense financially to price it below the paper version.

Assuming, of course, that lower prices mean less profits. That's not always
true. It's more complex than that.

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mynameishere
[http://isohunt.com/torrent_details/44151373/ebooks?tab=summa...](http://isohunt.com/torrent_details/44151373/ebooks?tab=summary)

28 gigabytes of ebooks. Why would publishers even want to encourage digital
formats? Obviously, ANY tactic that will slow the inevitable is good for them.

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GavinB
Aren't they just charging the price that they can get away with? The
publishing house and authors get the part of the money that would normally go
to the printers, loggers, shippers, etc.

~~~
cia_plant
Yes, they're charging the price that they can get away with. But they can only
get away with it because it's an anticompetitive industry. Publishing house X
should see the inflated price of ebooks as a revenue opportunity - undercut
everyone else by charging less of a markup, and they would probably get a much
larger chunk of the market to make up for it.

My guess why this isn't happening is because Publishing house X shares half
its board of directors with Publishing house Y, and they have some sort of
(probably implicit, since probably illegal) agreement to do whatever is
necessary to keep a lock on the industry, by restricting access through new
digital channels. See also: the music industry, the film industry, the
television industry.

