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Getting Gouged By E-Books?

GreenMonkey said:
The reason the prices are high is because all of the big publishing agencies (the Agency 6 as they are typically referred to) have engaged themselves in a price fixing scheme with the ebook retailers.

By treating the etailer as an "agent" and setting a selling price for them, the etailer has no choice in setting prices.

It's basically legalized pricefixing since they all do it. It started with Apple last year, you can thank them for it.

Add on the DRM and I buy hardcover books instead.
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hardcover books are a form of DRM. have you ever tried to make a copy of one?
 
ferzerp said:
The guy didn't nail it at all because he oversimplified it to the level of a survey course understanding.
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No more than everyone else seems to be oversimplifying things to the level of "fight the man" and "who's the bad guy. . . get 'im!' understanding.

The simple answer is that they charge these prices because they know we will pay it. I just don't think it's necessary to go looking for villains.

But since inventing villains and turning everything into a dramatic conspiracy undermining the very fabric of society is what the internet is for. . . here we are.

But the fact remains. The prices wouldn't be where they are if we weren't paying them. And if the book publishers (as a whole) could make more money setting different prices, they'd do it.

--H
 
Admittedly I skipped a few pages because the posts got repetitive. Of course, maybe mine will be too now..

If I recall correctly a while back there was a writeup about this explaining that the printing of books on a large scale was a very, very minute portion of the cost to the buyer. Sort of like the situation with manufacturing CDs where the disc is practical free compared to the cost of the product. Most of the cost comes from markup and legals feels, contracts, services etc. The price fixing issue has been around for years at least but it's worth noting that there are a lot of costs involved in creating a finished book and the printing/binding probably isn't the most expensive part.
 
wiseoracle said:
The cost of infrastructure to put the system in, is in the cost of the digital book.

I know that's not really a good excuse, but that's the best I can think of.
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What infrastructure? They use the internet I don't see them paying the telcos anythin for e-commerce outside normal ISP fees. The only expense is formatting the book to e-pub format. They already had to format books for print as well so it is not really an added cost.
 
Hurin said:
But since inventing villains and turning everything into a dramatic conspiracy undermining the very fabric of society is what the internet is for. . . here we are.
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It's not a conspiracy theory, anyone with a basic knowledge of the history of man can see that this "fabric of society" is a society based on greed and no matter how hard you try to make it all look fine and dandy I don't drink the grape Kool-Aid.
 
kontact said:
It's not a conspiracy theory, anyone with a basic knowledge of the history of man can see that this "fabric of society" is a society based on greed and no matter how hard you try to make it all look fine and dandy I don't drink the grape Kool-Aid.
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How about fruit punch? What do you have against grape?
 
I buy plenty of ebooks. Order the list by price. You don't always have to buy the newest books, they are hardly dated.
 
ferzerp said:
This is exactly correct, and I wish more people understood that. Apple, in their desire to compete with Amazon gave the publishers a foot in the door with an agency model agreement. Since Apple jumped in to bed with the publishers and gave them the power to set the price, we've had horrible e-book pricing. Before that happened, e-book prices were about what you would expect, always a bit cheaper than the physical counterpart.
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Yep.

Ididar said:
................................................
So, you're paying more because Apple didn't want to compete on price for e-books with Amazon. To fight that battle on its own terms it gave away your cheap e-books to the publishers. Thank Apple, and the publishers, for their little alliance to fuck with Amazon and other e-book sellers.
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Very well said. Yes most of this can be blamed on apple changing the game. I've seen the prices on a lot of books go up since apple started their book store.
 
I don’t know if it’s the same states side but over here in the UK, the reason they are nearly the same price of a real book is partly because of tax, (the rest is greed on the publishers front) Books are non-taxable items so VAT isn’t dumped on top of them, however e-books are classed as electronic media and not a book, which is taxable and receives a nice fat 20% on to the price

The other thing you need to consider is competition, eBooks just don’t have market penetration compared to real books, meaning there is a lot less competition between eBook retailers and less reason to start price wars, for instance, why mark it lower than the RRP when people are willing to pay the RRP, as interest grows you will eventually see the same kind of deals that real books have had for years.

With the boom in e readers this year I expect that competition level to change somewhat, then it might be wise to consider if buying that locked in Amazon Kindle was such a good idea after all ;)
 
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