[kamakazizuru]

Yes - but a person looking to buy the Malcolm Gladwell book - willing to buy it at 10$ - but who can only buy it at 15$ or more - will probably end up then either borrowing it from a friend or in the worst case downloading it as a PDF illegally. Both of which are a lost sale for the publisher and author.

[simias]

Do you have any numbers to back that up though?

I mean, I know that with e-readers book piracy is now potentially practical but is it really a concern for publisher? I'm really curious to know how mainstream it is.

I wouldn't be surprised if the main cause of piracy for ebooks was not the price but rather that the book is not available on a particular platform or only in paperback. Besides the demographics for book readers owning an e-reader is probably older and more wealthy than the average movie pirate.

The only numbers we have are those given by amazon, but we don't know exactly which books they used to make their statistics. We also don't know what the people who didn't buy the 15$ ebooks ended up doing, maybe they didn't buy anything at all, maybe they just bought the paperback...

[kamakazizuru]

A kindle costs <50$ - load it up with free PDFs downloaded via Torrents or other means and the notion : "book readers owning an e-reader is probably older and more wealthy than the average movie pirate" falls flat.

I dont have numbers to back it up - but plenty of anecdotal evidence and just common sense too. I myself have borrowed that malcolm gladwell book or the other - because the cheapest I could buy it was 20$ - and while I was interested in reading it - not enough to spend that much. Had it been 10$ - it would be worth it for me to just buy it rather than ask around friends if someone had a copy I could borrow. (You can also "borrow" books from friends on Kindle)

[WalterBright]

Bestsellers are the books that normally wind up in the thrift store for a buck. Ironically, it's the obscure books that wind up being pricey.