I must say that in the last year or so I have come to have a lot of problems with the pricing of books in general. The retailers and publishers have a lot to answer for. I have just gone along with everyone else in assuming that it just cost a lot of money to publish physical books and ship them to the store etc and then the store needs to make a decent profit to pay for their employees and floor space. In the last year though as digital editions of books have started to come out the prices in general aren’t reflecting any savings to the end purchaser. I leaves me wondering at the truth of statements made by publishers as to why they charge as much as they do for books. If we are no longer paying for the printing, the physical paper, the shipping and the retail floorspace and salaries of the sales people then what are we paying for. In the case of authors it is fairly criminal how little they get per book. One author I spoke with was getting royalties of only about 3% and in my opinion getting ripped off royally. Amazon right now is selling their books at around 30 dollars a copy and they are getting about 1 dollar per copy. If they published their own digital edition through amazon it could sell for half the cost and still get 5.25 a copy.. a 500% increase in profits. Or they could setup their own website and self publish from it using paypal and keep all the profits minus fairly minor expenses. It could published in PDF with the file locked to keep it from being easily copied. The simplest method would be to just have a link on the website that took you to paypal for payment and when the author got an email showing receipt of payment they could email to the purchaser. A little more difficult up front would be to set it up so that when they paid, it redirected them to a download page. As to loosing revenue doing this because it would be possible for people to give copies of the book away without paying for them. Well that is true. However it is not the problem you might think. Baen as a publisher has sold and given away full unencrypted copies of all the books they publish, in digital format, for years now and according to them it has not hurt sales. They say it has actually increased sales overall.
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