Put another way, if the market is willing to sustain the price (and sales figures suggest it is), why not charge $9.99 for a ebook?
They don't really know what volume they would do at a radically lower cost, because they haven't tried...and the reason they haven't tried is that they're terrified of cannibalizing print sales.
(Some individual authors, on the other hand, have tried cheaper prices, bypassing the publishers, and reported significantly enhanced revenue compared to a publishing contract.)
Also, I specified an open, non-DRM format because that way I could apply software to the problem: text summarization tools, staged memory training, and/or just copying sections out manually into summary documents.
So if they would drop their prices to 1/10th you wouldn't spend a penny more but you'd have more books? It's obvious how this is good for you, but how is that an advantage to them? They're trying to make money, not populate the world with books.
Further, you have a finite list of books you want. Even though it's growing it's not growing at the speed of light. If they let you get everything on your list for the 1/10th the price then they soon won't have anything else to sell you. Where are they going to recoup the money they lost buy letting you have 10 times the assets for the same cost?
What's more, chances are good that I'd spend more money. Aside from the expense, what keeps me from buying more books is the sheer physical space they occupy. If I could get electronic versions of them all, in formats that let me back them up, copy excerpts from them, etc., then that would cease to be an issue. But a restrictive DRM-encumbered file gives me less utility than a paper book, so I've been unwilling to spend as much money for it.
Gain for you, no gain for them.
>it's unlikely that they'll run out of things to sell me.
I find this hard to believe. Currently it sounds like you spend up to your max periodically. If every buying cycle you were able to completely empty your list, it's hard to imagine that there would never be a time that that list wouldn't be less then your max budgeted about, as it is now.
>What's more, chances are good that I'd spend more money.
No they're not. You've already explained that you're already spending all that you're comfortable spending. There is virtually no chance that you'd spend more. As I explained, it's much more likely you'd spend less.
>But a restrictive DRM-encumbered file gives me less utility than a paper book, so I've been unwilling to spend as much money for it.
What do you want to do that you can't? It will sync to at least 3 devices (I only have 3 applicable devices, so I don't know if I could push it to more). You can't loan it to people, that's true. You also can't copy it around as a file, but I don't see how that's a meaningful restriction.
Unless I break the DRM, I'm tied to the vendor. I have no guarantee that I'll still be able to read the book in 20 years, or read my margin notes. If I'm less fond of the book, I can't sell it when I'm done with it, or give it to a library.
Finally, I think the public benefit of getting more books in more people's hands shouldn't be discounted, given that the Constitution says the whole purpose of copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts."
I had no problem paying $9.99 for books on my kindle, but most of them are $12.99 now and I just feel like that's too much. In some cases, buying the physical hardcover is actually cheaper than $12.99 too, and that's what REALLY pisses some people off. The physical nature of the product surely is at least $1 - $2 of the actual cost of the the book, so buying it digitally gets rid of this cost.
Also, many books are destroyed if they're not sold (hence the "if you bought this book without a cover" warning in the front of many books). By moving to digital, the publishers no longer have to eat these costs.
So basically, eBook pricing is complete bullshit.
Just like private repositories are a service that brings value that people are willing to pay for, so is having an entire book in a small and portable format.
Ignore the costs related to making and distributing the physical objects when it comes to pricing them; if that's accepted wisdom for start-ups, why wouldn't it be for established companies?
So the Agency pricing scheme is only changing the pocket where money goes.
And keep in mind that in countries like China, the same books cost usually $3, after translating rights, printing, distribution and publishers costs. And publishers still live on this, in a country where people buy much less books.
So what is fucked up is that someone is making money, and it doesn't even benefit the authors.
It's more or less the same problem as in music.
Irrelevant. Pricing is based on value provided, not cost to create.
>and it doesn't even benefit the authors.
This is indeed an issue, but it is then up to authors to find better representation the way that athletes have so they can get a larger share in the value they create.