I think really what consumers are angry about is that the kindle/nook used to advertise the fact that ebooks were cheaper than buying the physical book and initially they were. Wouldn't you be a little angry now if you had invested a lot of money into the kindle/nook and justified it by the cheaper price in books? You can't blame them for ranting a little.
Kindle and Nook readers bash high e-book pricing with angry one-star reviews
61–70 of 78 posts
Re: Kindle and Nook readers bash high e-book pricing with angry one-star reviews
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's a good article from a few months ago about the economics of ebook pricing. It supports your comments about the publishers having too much control over the pricing. http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2011/01/16/why-do-ebooks-cos...
For the publisher to have any effective control over the price of a book, they have to control the distribution channel for books. But they manifestly do not. If you want to sell a book for $0.99, you can do so today. Three of the elephants in the room are: * That the $9.99 price point comes in a package deal that includes promotional advantages authors want * That the $9.99 price point is calculated by publishers to…
We are in the very early days for finding the profit-maximizing prices for ebooks. If publishers stand in the way of experimentation, someone else will find the sweet spots (I don't expect there to be just one). I read of a mystery author recently whose sales went up 20x by dropping the price from $3 to $1. The additional profits of finding the optimal price could be enough to offset the publisher's advantages.
It's an interesting dog fight, if you don't have a dog in it. As an author, though, it looks mighty risky.
Re: Kindle and Nook readers bash high e-book pricing with angry one-star reviews
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it equally facile to rely on the market to set the price when dealing with an industry that has a history of price fixing and collusion...
How exactly do publishers get to fix the price of books on the Internet? If you want to sell a book below $9.99, what's stopping you? What am I missing about this comment? I am asking seriously: 6 people voted it up, and my read is that it's content-free. I'm willing to believe I'm simply wrong about it and I missed a subtlety, but I'd sure like to know what it is.
Price fixing is when parties coordinate to set the prices of their items. It doesn't matter that you're able to sell your books at any price -- if two or more publishers got together and agreed not to cut prices below a certain point, then they were engaged in price fixing, by definition.
I'm not really sure what your point was. Was it that a self published $2.99 Jabba the Hut fan fiction novelette proves that collusion isn't influencing ebook prices?
Re: Kindle and Nook readers bash high e-book pricing with angry one-star reviews
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the publisher to have any effective control over the price of a book, they have to control the distribution channel for books. But they manifestly do not. If you want to sell a book for $0.99, you can do so today. Three of the elephants in the room are: * That the $9.99 price point comes in a package deal that includes promotional advantages authors want * That the $9.99 price point is calculated by publishers to…
We are in the very early days for finding the profit-maximizing prices for ebooks. If publishers stand in the way of experimentation, someone else will find the sweet spots (I don't expect there to be just one). I read of a mystery author recently whose sales went up 20x by dropping the price from $3 to $1. The additional profits of finding the optimal price could be enough to offset the publisher's advantages. It's…
This is the great thing about readership moving from paper books to ebooks: the only thing close to a controlled distribution channel we have is Amazon, and it's in Amazon's best interests to let indies expiriment with the channel.
Re: Kindle and Nook readers bash high e-book pricing with angry one-star reviews
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're playing games with the definition of a "review". People looking for book reviews are in virtually all cases looking for information about the content of the book. I can't win the nerd argument with you that there is no information whatsoever in the review bombs, so I won't bother; I'll just rest my case that the information is below the noise threshold, and adds so much extra noise as to make the reviews usele…
You can also view it as a protest of a company's practice. People protest in front of brick-and-mortar establishments all the time to make consumers aware of things which may affect their decisions. I wouldn't call that "holding stores hostage." If a review has zero information, then I agree with you that it is absolutely worthless and should be removed. However, if a review clearly states why it is scored the way it…
I am viewing it as a protest of the company's practice. It is also vandalism. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
Re: Kindle and Nook readers bash high e-book pricing with angry one-star reviews
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no natural law of scarcity which suppliers are required to honor. They can produce as much or as little of a good as they want. The producer controls scarcity of their offering. The market responds by identifying substitutes , not by coercing the producer into relaxing scarcity. If your logic held, every paper book would cost the same amount; _The Very Hungry Caterpiller_ would cost within pennies of the sam…
Scarcity is a key component of prices in that it affects the supply of a given good at a given price. Paper, ink, production time, human labor, etc. are all goods that have limited supply so they must be allocated accordingly. If you're a parent you know that the Very Hungry Caterpiller uses different paper and different production techniques (holes in the pages, thicker paper) which while raising the cost is offset…
I don't know what this means. I see terms like "demand curve" and "key component of prices". But by your definition, the scarcity of any ebook is epsilon. Therefore, TAOCP must cost the same as Twilight.
Re: Kindle and Nook readers bash high e-book pricing with angry one-star reviews
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree completely, so, artificially pumping review sites full of reviews by people who haven't actually read the book as a protest movement doesn't seem like a market-improving action to me.
First, the reviews inform people that the books are available cheaper in other formats, which they might not have known. Second, if the reviews do cause the publisher to lower the price, that will presumably result in more sales, and there will be more consumer surplus gained than producer surplus lost. Boom, market improvement.
When supplier are coerced into changing their prices by force, that isn't the market at work.
You don't like the word "coercion" or "force" because you think stuffing review sites with non-good-faith-reviews it harmless, even though it contravenes the expectation that a reviewer represents a single entity who has actually attempted to consume the book. But the same logic was used during the Wikileaks Visa DDoS flood. You can choose to believe that DDoS attacks are legitimate, too. But you cannot with a straight face say that those attacks are the market at work.
Re: Kindle and Nook readers bash high e-book pricing with angry one-star reviews
#68Sadly, Apple is largely to blame for this mess. Well, if you ignore the publishers. Ebooks started as a wholesale pricing model. The publishers would sell them to the likes of Amazon at some fixed price. Amazon would then set their own price. This is very similar to the brick-and-mortar pricing model. In some cases Amazon would sell those books at a loss in an effort to grow the Kindle platform. Publishers didn't lik…
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Re: Kindle and Nook readers bash high e-book pricing with angry one-star reviews
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
How exactly do publishers get to fix the price of books on the Internet? If you want to sell a book below $9.99, what's stopping you? What am I missing about this comment? I am asking seriously: 6 people voted it up, and my read is that it's content-free. I'm willing to believe I'm simply wrong about it and I missed a subtlety, but I'd sure like to know what it is.
Price fixing is when parties coordinate to set the prices of their items. It doesn't matter that you're able to sell your books at any price -- if two or more publishers got together and agreed not to cut prices below a certain point, then they were engaged in price fixing, by definition. I'm not really sure what your point was. Was it that a self published $2.99 Jabba the Hut fan fiction novelette proves that collus…
Why does all self-published work need to be of the quality of Jabba the Hut fan fiction? You see my point but have decided to caricature it.
I look at this situation and see it as evidence that the days of large publishers acting as gatekeepers for authorship are limited.
You seem to look at the same situation and see it as an injustice that merits some kind of intervention at publishers to change the price of publisher-approved books.
I do not agree; further, I think it's impossible to hold your viewpoint in 2011 and at the same time say you believe in markets.
Re: Kindle and Nook readers bash high e-book pricing with angry one-star reviews
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I characterize the view that this is "largely Apple's fault" to be somewhat myopic. Apple responded to a condition in the market, namely, publishers were plenty upset that Amazon used their position as the only viable ebook venue at the time to handcuff publishers to a $9.99 price point.
Amazon had the market power to force a $9.99 price point in spite of publishers' preferences. Apple lacked that power and followed publishers' preferences. This entrance of Apple as a competitor reduced Amazon's market power, allowing the publishers to dictate pricing.
Am I missing something or is it indeed possible to put an ebook on an Apple device or an Amazon device at a price point lower than $9.99?