Amazon tried, really hard, to get a monopoly on ebooks. Had it worked, you’d have seen ebook prices go up. The agency model should allow publishers to be more responsive.
I’m hoping to get published before long and have spent a lot of time looking at the traditional publishing versus epublishing industries. Epublishing is going to win, but traditional publishers will have their place if they can figure it out.
If I pull up the iBooks store on my ipad, there’s thousands of random, self-published SF or fantasy novels there. If I want something I know is good, I go look at the recently published lists for Tor, or Pyr, or Baen, or whoever. Doesn’t mean the book will be good but it’s a better bet than just randomly downloading stuff.
Why should an e-book cost any more than $10. There is no more cost to “print” 1 million of them than there is to “print” 1.
I can understand real books costing more as there is a whole supply chain to support. E-books don’t have that problem.
Couple bucks for the author, couple bucks for the publisher, couple bucks for the retailer and the buyer gets a good book for a good price.
The cost to the buyer is that (if I understand correctly) he can’t resell the book or loan it out to friends like he would a real book. Kind of hard to ask him to pay the same as a real book but take away some of the advantages of real books.
I quit buying from Amazon when their delivery price was almost equal to what I was buying. A $15 NOOK cover cost $8 to ship. Last time!
Amazon didn’t extort anything from anyone. The choice for publishers was to sell their ebook versions at a reasonable price or not. Those who did not want to sell a virtual copy at a lower price would lose out, big time.
Apple and the publishers appear to be colluding to fix the price of the ebooks at a higher amount to rake in more money for a product that is inexpensive to produce.
“Made in China” ping.
There is no reason a print book should cost LESS than an ebook.
I have been expecting this for a while.
Project Gutenberg offers over 38,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online.
I'm currently reading all the Barsoom books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It's awesome.
Another publisher that I find to be extremely consumer-friendly is Baen Publishing. If you're into Science Fiction, they have a lot of titles for you. They also have a good sized free library. I strongly recommend books from the 1632 series, of which, you can down load the first few for free. These books are not DRM encumbered, because they do not believe their customers are thieves.
There was a power outage in my home last night. It was real dark. All I had was a handgun, a candle and a Bible. The trade off in the long run spells disaster. JMHO though.
Perhaps of interest.