

If publishers can't cover costs w/ $10 ebooks they deserve to go out of business - pavel_lishin
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120417/03333118519/if-publishers-cant-cover-their-costs-with-10-ebooks-then-they-deserve-to-go-out-business.shtml

======
guan
If Amazon decided to sell e-books for $9.99, that’s surely not the revenue
maximizing price for the publishers in the long run, or the profit maximizing
price when looking at e-books in isolation.

Amazon had a huge interest in locking users in to the Kindle platform. This is
something they were willing to pay a lot of money for, and so they would
rationally have priced e-books below the revenue maximizing price.

After they “won”, Amazon would either have raised e-book prices to take
advantage of their monopoly, or maybe kept prices low as a loss leader.

------
tatsuke95
$10 is just as dumb and arbitrary. To assume that some of the obscure, well
researched non-fiction that I enjoy will sell many more copies simply because
the price is lower is naive.

The answer is no price control. Forecast demand, costs and what an acceptable
return on the book is. Then let the market sort it out. If that's $1 or $100,
so be it.

In the end the publishers no longer matter; it's all about distribution.

~~~
runevault
Eh, at least in most of the places I've seen the 9.99 price used, it was for
fiction not non-fiction. Many forms of non-fiction have always gone for more,
even when Amazon set the price prior to the whole agency model. I know tech
books I expect to pay a good chunk more even on sale, as well as my other
hobbies (writing books have eaten up so much of my money...)

------
taylodl
Only Amazon has any assurance of making money. Incredible. What do you people
plan on reading when the content providers go out of business? Each other's
blogs? Have fun with that.

~~~
Turing_Machine
The "content providers" are authors, artists, and editors, and they aren't
going anywhere, much less out of business.

Publishers are middlemen who've prospered by wedging themselves in between the
money and the talent.

------
bediger4000
Amen, Brother Techdirt. That's been my thought when I hear about price-fixing,
and how much an "e-book" costs. Criminy, some paperbacks are less than $10.

