3 ms·
It seems to me that this article is pretty clueless The part about the relationship between price and sales shows a total obliviousness to basic economics > A
by robertskmiles 15y ago
It seems to me that this article is pretty clueless
The part about the relationship between price and sales shows a total obliviousness to basic economics
> A 99 cent book may bring authors a lot more money than $9.99 one.
> ... I don't know where they got this idea from. It is not true.
> Sure, providing something at a discount yields a higher sale, but it is not at the same rate.
The author has sort of independently reached some of the conclusions of simple economics, but honestly you'd be far better off just reading the wikipedia page of Elasticity of Demand (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_elasticity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_elasticity).
The question is pretty much just "Is demand for ebooks elastic or inelastic?". I don't hold it against the author, but they're really reinventing wheel, and the wheel they've come up with is kind of wonky.
> Every other type of product cost more today than 10 years ago. A bottle of milk costs more today than in the past. A bicycle costs more than in the past, a meal at a restaurant cost more today than ever before. The gas prices are off the scale (but for other reasons as well.)
That's just dramatically factually untrue (in real terms). Yes, with inflation, a lot of things now cost a larger number of currency units than they once did, but in real terms bicycles (to use their example) are a lot cheaper than they were, because they can be mass produced in enormous numbers in China.
> Content is the only industry in which the price of content has dropped. ... Every other product costs more. Content costs less.
I might be wrong here, but I believe just about all manufactured goods have substantially fallen in price in real terms since the 60s.
tl;dr This person needs to read a high-school level book on economics (or just the chapters about Inflation and Elasticity of Demand) before telling people how to price their goods.