[orky56]

This article is really pushing the fact that books have become commodities. They no longer compete on quality but rather with cost. Pricing is less around value and more on cost plus.

I personally believe that there are salient differences between books (quality, time spent, book cover, number of pages, etc.) and having a big name publisher can open many opportunities for new authors just like in the music industry. I guess it would be more accurate to say that publishers can free up authors' time by using the publisher's resources for marketing and distribution, etc.

On a site like Hacker News, we take the success of product differentiation for granted. The best product will differentiate itself based on sound understanding of product development and will thus succeed. It would be unsafe to assume that business aspects are irrelevant.

[runevault]

Eh not sure I agree with that much.

First books/discovery is a bit of a commodity because they don't know who you are yet, same as new apps can be. But once a reader has come to enjoy your writing, they tend to be willing to pay more to keep enjoying your work.

A great example is several fantasy publishing houses have begun putting first ebooks in series on sale for 2.99 to lure people in and get them to pay full price for the rest of the series. I've already gotten hooked on one series this way.

[robryan]

If you look at the app store, there is room for free apps, for quality apps around the 99 cent price point and niche apps/ big names up at the $10 mark. I think a similar thing will happen in the ebook market, personally depending on the book I'm more than happy to pay at the $10-$12 price point which I guess is at the top of the market.

I'm not the fastest reader and I don't devote more than probably an hour a day on average to long form reading so one book can keep me going for some time, I'm sure others that power through books in a day would feel differently about the high price point.

[runevault]

The way "also bought by" on amazon plays out actually helps with this price segmentation. The people on a writer forum I follow noticed that (unsurprisingly) kindle bestsellers tend to have other kindle bestsellers in their also bought list, while other books mostly have books in the same price range (2.99s having other 2.99s, .99s having other .99s, etc) as part of their their also bought lists.

Be curious to see if that continues to play out, however.

[salemh]

I would be interested in this writers forum, and saw no contact information in your profile to ask :)

[runevault]

you can hit me up at Patrick [at] patrickjsullivan.me

[nochiel]

> They no longer compete on quality but rather with cost.

I'm not certain that books ever competed on quality. A cursory glance at the NY Times best-seller list of the past few years seems to indicate that quality isn't a [major] factor. Unless you somehow consider Harry Potter, Da Vinci Code, Twilight, and so on, to somehow be the paragon of quality literature.

[larrik]

You're confusing "quality literature" with "books people like to read." They aren't the same (though they may overlap).

The Da Vinci Code keeps a frenetic pace that makes "quality" secondary, and quite difficult to achieve. (I would submit that The Bourne Supremacy is superior in both pacing and quality, however).

Harry Potter is insanely accessible and easy to read, and has a very surprising amount of internal consistency, even over 7 books (which is in stark contrast to most mainstream sci-fi/fantasy series).

As for Twilight, I don't know what makes a book appeal to that demographic, but it seems pretty different than any area I've dabbled in as a reader.

(I worry that giving opinions like these opens me up for some interesting flaming, but whatever.

[nochiel]

> You're confusing "quality literature" with "books people like to read."

I'm not confusing anything. The comment I responded to stated that "books have become commodities. They no longer compete on quality but rather with cost."

Assume it is true, as insinuated, that books did compete on quality, then the result of winning that competition is a given book becoming widely read (in other words "books people like to read"). I submitted that line of thinking has a false premise.

That's all I was responding to. No confusion whatsoever.