Motoko Rich, New York Times; Libraries and Readers Wade Into Digital Lending:
"Pam Sandlian Smith, library director of the Rangeview Library District, which serves a suburban community north of Denver, said that instead of purchasing a set number of digital copies of a book, she would prefer to buy one copy and pay a nominal licensing fee each time a patron downloaded it.
Publishers, inevitably, are nervous about allowing too much of their intellectual property to be offered free. Brian Murray, the chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, said Ms. Smith’s proposal was “not a sustainable model for publishers or authors.”
Some librarians object to the current pricing model because they often pay more for e-books than do consumers who buy them on Amazon or in Sony’s online store. Publishers generally charge the same price for e-books as they do for print editions, but online retailers subsidize the sale price of best sellers by marking them down to $9.99."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/15/books/15libraries.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=libraries%20rich&st=cse
Showing posts with label e-book prices. Show all posts
Showing posts with label e-book prices. Show all posts
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Steal This Book (for $9.99); The New York Times, 5/17/09
Motoko Rich via The New York Times; Steal This Book (for $9.99):
"Publishers are caught between authors who want to be paid high advances and consumers who believe they should pay less for a digital edition, largely because the publishers save on printing and shipping costs. But publishers argue that those costs, which generally run about 12.5 percent of the average hardcover retail list price, do not entirely disappear with e-books. What’s more, the costs of writing, editing and marketing remain the same...
The doomsday scenario for publishing is that the e-book versions cannibalize higher-price print sales...
Another possibility is that the cheaper prices for e-books entice consumers to buy more titles...
There is some precedent for that theory. When the smaller-format mass-market paperbacks that now populate airport bookstores and grocery checkout racks were introduced, publishers expressed fears that the lower-priced books might destroy the market for hardcovers. They didn’t. Instead, they expanded demand for books beyond elite readers."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/weekinreview/17rich.html?scp=3&sq=e-books%20motoko%20rich&st=cse
"Publishers are caught between authors who want to be paid high advances and consumers who believe they should pay less for a digital edition, largely because the publishers save on printing and shipping costs. But publishers argue that those costs, which generally run about 12.5 percent of the average hardcover retail list price, do not entirely disappear with e-books. What’s more, the costs of writing, editing and marketing remain the same...
The doomsday scenario for publishing is that the e-book versions cannibalize higher-price print sales...
Another possibility is that the cheaper prices for e-books entice consumers to buy more titles...
There is some precedent for that theory. When the smaller-format mass-market paperbacks that now populate airport bookstores and grocery checkout racks were introduced, publishers expressed fears that the lower-priced books might destroy the market for hardcovers. They didn’t. Instead, they expanded demand for books beyond elite readers."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/weekinreview/17rich.html?scp=3&sq=e-books%20motoko%20rich&st=cse
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