Hacker News Reader

Comment by smugglerFlynn | Hacker News Reader

Any book that is $5 more expensive than current market price will instantly lose to thousands of competative cheaper books where authors write about similar topics while agreeing to earn peanuts.

You can try solving this by industry-wide regulations, but that would make average price of books much higher, and will likely steer readers to other medias, shift revenues to already established writers, or both.

View on HN

>Any book that is $5 more expensive than current market price will instantly lose to thousands of competative cheaper books where authors write about similar topics while agreeing to earn peanuts.

I could see this being true for non-fiction, but for fiction? I'm generally not looking at price, I'm looking at whether the story seems interesting.

Two books can both be about space battles (or whatever your topic of choice is), but one can seem extremely interesting while the other doesn't. Similar topics doesn't really mean much compared to everything else (writing style, characters, etc.)

Are books purchase really so price sensitive? It's not exactly like you're buying potatoes

I’m not sure it’s a continuous supply-demand curve but you get out of the “normal” discounted range—say above $15–and people will really think twice.

IMO, in the age of Kindle Unlimited, yes. I, myself, have a very hard time justifying purchases over $6. The reason is pretty simple, the higher priced books are not guaranteed to be better, just written by a more widely recognized author.

"You can try solving this by industry-wide regulations"

Also known as "price fixing".

OP should just donate $5 to his favorite writers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com