High Book Prices Are Good For You | Hacker News Reader

High Book Prices Are Good For You

johnwiswell.blogspot.com

8 pointsmcantor14 comments

"If you sincerely believe the fruits of my labors will only ever be worth reading for $0.99, then I question what our relationship is."

Here's the thing, for this author or any: you don't get to choose the value of your product in the market. You can set a price, but talking down to people who don't pay you what you think your product is worth doesn't make them wrong.

I wouldn't expect many creators to start understanding this point. To accept the reality that the demand for new (music / books / newspaper stories) just simply isn't high enough to support very many people making their living that way would be to sacrifice a significant portion of a life's dream or an identity for a lot of people. That's not an easy thing to accept.

> the fruits of my labors

To me, the value of the fruits of most people's labor are anywhere from zero to some negative number after accounting for the time I will spend reading those "fruits." This is why I don't read every book on the market.

That's only half an opinion, though. He's arguing that the bestselling authors give self-published ones the room to charge more. In the "value" scape, he doesn't get to decide how much his book is worth, but wouldn't be able to charge 3.99 or whatever he wants if the norm was 0.99. The actual value is more determinable thanks to the market conditions.

Trying to guilt people into paying more for your product by complaining about the price of doctors' visits and how hard you worked on your product is a terrific business model.

No. High book prices is not good for me, but it may be good for the authors. There are quite a big difference since there is a nearly limitless amount of good literature out there that I could enjoy.

I don't particularly object to $15-25 ebooks. I do object to $250 ones.

http://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Germany-ebook/dp/B000Q360KK/

http://books.google.com/books?id=0Sdo1gNF4D8C

Can we stop charging consumers library prices for nonfiction? I'd appreciate that.

Ask this question to college students, majority would object to high pricing.

The "you" in this case is the author.

Is it still good for the reader?

Depends if the reader cares about the author?

Why should the reader? The author doesn't care about the reader!

There's something really messed up if you don't care about the person from whom you're reading several hundred pages.

That's less messed up than if you don't care about the thousands of people for whom you're writing several hundred pages. When you start telling people, "You should be happy to pay me an arbitrarily high price," that's your failure as a businessman. Unless your work is truly breathtaking, there's probably another author about as good as you who will sell his book at the price the market dictates. Your potential readers will be his actual readers, and thus they will care more about him than you.

This is a marketplace transaction. "Care" has no place in it other than delivering a product people will pay for. Ideally one properly formatted and without typos. (I'm not going talk about writing because all bets are off there.)

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