http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57384913/so-how-much-is-a-fair-price-to-pay-for-an-e-book/?tag=cbsnewsMainColumnArea
Quote from: MIGMaster on February 28, 2012, 02:33:03 PM
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57384913/so-how-much-is-a-fair-price-to-pay-for-an-e-book/?tag=cbsnewsMainColumnArea
From the article:
QuoteWas this in the best interests of consumers?
Utter BS.
Set the price. If consumers think it's too much they won't buy it.
Why is a free market considered a Bad Thing
TM? If it doesn't work, someone will build a better mousetrap.
The question also implies that a writer's work is perhaps worthless. From what I've seen on Amazon, e-books sell for about $4 less than a paperback. What I figure to be about the cost of production (and maybe some distribution). There's nothing wrong with a writer making a few dollars off me (and his publisher) for their efforts.
Nor is there anything wrong with me refusing to buy an ebook that I felt was overpriced (and there have been a couple I passed on for that very reason).
Yep, I have passed on several ebooks from B&N due to price.
I find most of the of the Amazon Kindle books pretty reasonably priced. You get the odd exception.
I find that if the price for an e-book is higher than I'm willing to pay, I can often find a copy from the BC public libraries. Takes a bit of work to convert it to .mobi format so I can read it on my Kindle but if I can't get it to convert due to DRM, I can usually read it on my iPhone.
I don't necessarily have a price limit on the e-books I buy. Generally I tend to stay below the $8 mark. It's a completely arbitrary amount set on my part, but I think it's a fair deal. Author gets a cut, Amazon gets a cut and I get a book to read. Winning situation all around in my opinion. I wanted to read Dune again, but for the love of all get out they still wanted like $15 for the book. Great book and worth that much or more for a quality paper edition, but digital? I don't know man, I just don't know.
What you guys think of a publisher like Baen (Honor Harrington series among many others) that refuses to release their ebooks to B&N, Amazon and iBooks. They do sell their ebooks for about $6, but what if you're a new reader, and never see those books listed on your ereader. Baen does a lot of great things, but I think this is a strategy that will come back to bite them hard.
Quote from: OJsDad on March 26, 2012, 05:28:19 PM
What you guys think of a publisher like Baen (Honor Harrington series among many others) that refuses to release their ebooks to B&N, Amazon and iBooks. They do sell their ebooks for about $6, but what if you're a new reader, and never see those books listed on your ereader. Baen does a lot of great things, but I think this is a strategy that will come back to bite them hard.
Oddly enough, the last two HH hardcovers (before the most recent) came with CDs in them that had all of Weber's Baen books
compiled on them in multiple ebook formats at no extra charge. I'll have to dig out out to see what it says about giving the files
to others.
Staggerwing, it was free for distribution. I got the whole thing from the Fifth Imperium, which is linked from David Webers web site, last year and read all of the HH books. Great searies, not sure why I never picked them up before. I also got all four of the original starfire books on that download. I have the paper backs, but glad to have them in eformat.
Like I said, Baen does a lot of great things, but not releasing their eformat books to book distributors is not one of them. I think as time goes on and younger people move more to ereaders and there are less and less book stores, people will only find Baen by stumbling across them.