On the other hand, pre-Kindle, most of the publishers (Baen excluded) seemed happy to charge the undiscounted hardcover price for ebooks, sometimes well into their paperback run. Since in the age of Amazon and discount bookstores, no one pays the undiscounted discount price for the hardcover itself, one might be forgiven for being concerned that their pricing model this time around will be aimed at protecting the hardcopy market more than expanding the ebook market.
Time will tell. But now that publishers have decided to take over pricing to the consumer (which is their legal right), it will be interesting to see if they do better than the music industry at protecting their own interests, let alone the consumer's. As I just posted in a similar thread elsewhere, if the price/DRM inconvenience is higher than the inconvenience, risks, and moral freight associated with piracy, and slates or readers become ubiquitous, they could wind up with a generation that's no more likely to pay for a book than for a newspaper subscription.
That's not something I want to see happen. I value the services of editors for their gatekeeping function, and I've seen what manuscripts look like before copy editors and proofreaders get to them. But the fact that I want journalism to continue isn't making newspapers' business models look any more viable, and over a decade of suing grandma hasn't succeeded in enforcing the idea that music is supposed to be paid for all that effectively. Insofar as anything has reclaimed the paid music market, it was Apple strongarming the music publishers into cheap, simple pricing (and then dropping DRM), the way Amazon tried (but failed, thanks in part to Apple) to strongarm the book publishers.
That model isn't going to happen for books, evidently. The publishers will get to make their own decisions, and again, that's their right. They know their costs and expected profit margin, and I don't. And unless they open their books-- which they have no particular obligation to do-- I have no real knowledge about their cost structure. (Or why the prices they charge have been going up faster than inflation all my life. It used to be explained in terms of rising paper prices and the collapse of the independent distributor system, but now apparently paper and distribution aren't important components of the overall cost, so I'm back to not knowing.) I also have no opinion about what the "right" or "fair" price is. I just know the price that I'm willing to pay before I go with the library, or substitute a free 19th century classic from Gutenberg, instead, which is all I really need concern myself with.
More important to them than one idiosyncratic reader like me is the price at which a substantial number of users start trying to figure out how to get the bootleg version instead, which is entirely orthogonal to their costs of production. Maybe they can do better at figuring that out than some of their predecessors to this dance did. (Though consumer pricing is precisely what publishers haven't had close control of in recent decades, between discounting and the secondary market, so they don't have a lot of experience.) I guess we'll see.
no subject
Time will tell. But now that publishers have decided to take over pricing to the consumer (which is their legal right), it will be interesting to see if they do better than the music industry at protecting their own interests, let alone the consumer's. As I just posted in a similar thread elsewhere, if the price/DRM inconvenience is higher than the inconvenience, risks, and moral freight associated with piracy, and slates or readers become ubiquitous, they could wind up with a generation that's no more likely to pay for a book than for a newspaper subscription.
That's not something I want to see happen. I value the services of editors for their gatekeeping function, and I've seen what manuscripts look like before copy editors and proofreaders get to them. But the fact that I want journalism to continue isn't making newspapers' business models look any more viable, and over a decade of suing grandma hasn't succeeded in enforcing the idea that music is supposed to be paid for all that effectively. Insofar as anything has reclaimed the paid music market, it was Apple strongarming the music publishers into cheap, simple pricing (and then dropping DRM), the way Amazon tried (but failed, thanks in part to Apple) to strongarm the book publishers.
That model isn't going to happen for books, evidently. The publishers will get to make their own decisions, and again, that's their right. They know their costs and expected profit margin, and I don't. And unless they open their books-- which they have no particular obligation to do-- I have no real knowledge about their cost structure. (Or why the prices they charge have been going up faster than inflation all my life. It used to be explained in terms of rising paper prices and the collapse of the independent distributor system, but now apparently paper and distribution aren't important components of the overall cost, so I'm back to not knowing.) I also have no opinion about what the "right" or "fair" price is. I just know the price that I'm willing to pay before I go with the library, or substitute a free 19th century classic from Gutenberg, instead, which is all I really need concern myself with.
More important to them than one idiosyncratic reader like me is the price at which a substantial number of users start trying to figure out how to get the bootleg version instead, which is entirely orthogonal to their costs of production. Maybe they can do better at figuring that out than some of their predecessors to this dance did. (Though consumer pricing is precisely what publishers haven't had close control of in recent decades, between discounting and the secondary market, so they don't have a lot of experience.) I guess we'll see.