Consumers may be hurt because of less options but you yourself state how many books are published, we will never be at a loss of content and anything that is not produced that otherwise would have been, we will not know about.

The world is changing and the consumer is king. With the option to simply pirate or ignore content (there is plenty to choose from) that is not convenient most of these methods are not good ideas. People with ebook readers read more, publishers will need to adjust to a lower profit higher volume world.  

Don’t make the same mistake as the movie industry. Make things more readily available not less. 

Retailers selling products at less than cost is clearly an anomaly that needs to be corrected.

I don't know about you, but I'm overwhelmed by the amount of content out there. Not just half a million new books every year, but blogs and websites, too.

Classical economics tells us that when supply exceeds demand, prices will eventually fall to create a new equilibrium.

I think we're just seeing the beginning of that.

I live in a small town and do most of my shopping at Wal-Mart. I buy books there, too. Rarely, do I go to the big cities with their bookstores (we have one true book/gift store–its prices are way too high). With time and economic issues, I don't see more frequent bookstore visits in my future. I appreciate the book section in Wal-Mart because it fits into my life.

Why don't you publishers use the changing circumstances to promote and sell more copies of your books? Work out deals with the "big box" entities in order to increase your numbers. Remember, you have the products these guys need to have access to in order to stay in business.

By the time you add the cost of capital to finance accounts receivable, author advances, and inventory, you're left with pretty slim margins. Added to this is the fact that more than half of new books lose money. The books that work have to earn enough to cover the losses.

Like most things, there is more to it than make be apparent on the surface.

Thanks.

Instead of attempting to preserve the multi-million dollar advance/$35 hardcover business model, publishers need to create a new model based on $10 paperbacks printed on demand and $10 content-enriched ebooks. The publisher who figures out how to profitably provide content consumers want, in the format they want, at the price they want to pay, wins.

On your mark, get set, go!

If the book business follows the music industry, the CBA channel will disappear, along with Bible and backlist sales. However, while music is inherently digital, books are not necessarily digital. Physical books will endure! The loss of the CBA channel would be tragic to authors, publishers, consumers and the mission.

I do believe that the price of some hardcover books is based on the expectation of heavy discounting. A reasonable price of $20 for a major hardcover with a MP seems to make more sense than $29 discounted 30%, but then again, the consumer always loves deals!

I would support MP, MAP, channel specific distribution (of course, I would want a CBA exclusive….).

Thanks for the dialog. Lots to chew on.

I'm working on creating ebook versions of my publishing company's old and new print titles. It's like building a new company alongside the old one. We have to check all the contracts–for the content the author sold us; for the charts, photos, long quotes or other content that the author used; and for the cover art and interior design elements our designer used–to make sure we can reproduce them all in digital form. In many cases we have to revise the content or cover or pay additional digital rights fees. Then we have to edit the content to add appropriate links, revise formatting that won't work on an ereader, change the copyright page, and so on. Once we have a final file to work with, we have to convert it into the various formats we want to offer and test for any problems on different ereaders. We might do that with internal staff or we might send the file out for conversion. We have to create marketing information and send it to our vendors. Some of these costs are different (and may end up being less) than for a print book, but they are still significant. And we don't expect to sell as many ebooks as we do print books, so the amount of internal cost that an ebook can bear is less–at least right now.

In addition we still pay a similar royalty to the author for an ebook–in general it's about 4% less than for a print book. And we still spend money on marketing and sales efforts. We have also built and now maintain a webstore where we can sell ebooks and other downloadable products direct to customers. With that comes the need for an extra employee to handle customer service questions and requests. Any savings we have on overhead because our warehouse staff aren't involved with ebook fulfillment is offset by the extra work our business and IT staff have to do to reconcile ebook sales into "orders" after the fact (Amazon.com and others tell us how many books they've sold and we create an order based on their sales report) and to support our webstore and customer records–so we can keep track of what individuals order and give them lifetime access to their purchases, among other things. We have also spent time and money retrofitting our internal operations to accommodate ebooks in a variety of ways. Many of these things simply were never needed when we were just publishing print books.

Some of these costs are "start up" costs and will diminish or disappear over time, and, sure, ebooks are in an experimental phase, so we publishers have to be willing to take some risk and invest now–planning to have that investment pay us back over the next few years. But we would be foolish to adopt a pricing structure that doesn't take these real and significant costs into account.

To me it makes sense to drop the ebook price by about 20% from the least expensive print edition. That's about the savings publishers get when they can remove printing and shipping costs and everything else stays equal–or shifts from one internal cost area to another. During the next few years, if we find that we can shave our internal costs after our infrastructure development is done, then we should pass more saving on to our readers or pass more revenue on to our authors–or both.

This is just 2 cents from one in the trenches.