Sony's Haber: You Can't Make Money Selling E-Books For $9.99
Found on paidContent on Wednesday, 16 December 2009
Haber decried the emphasis on the $9.99 price point for e-books. "The $9.99 price point is not a money-maker," he said. "Certain bestsellers are sold at that price for retail, competitive reasons. But you need to have a range. You could go from $10 to $20 even to $100 for an e-book."
Haber went on to defend the of DRM, which he doesn't see going away for awhile. "You need an orderly process to sell books and DRM makes that possible, mainly because it allows content creators and distributors to make money from that content."
See, and that's why I don't buy Sony products anymore. If I pay $100 for a book, I expect it to be either very rare, or of high quality. The content sure has its worth, but $100 for a single download? No thanks. If I'd be a writer, I would prefer that 100 people pay $1 each to read my book instead of a single fan who cashes out $100. In the end, I make the same but my audience is 100 times greater. And that DRM argument is so wrong it is ridiculous: DRM isn't needed to distribute and sell something, it only exists to limit what customers can do with the product they just paid for.