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Comment by krschultz | Hacker News Reader

For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000.

That seems like a hard won data point, I'm surprised they threw it out to the public domain. It makes intuitive sense to me though. I buy a lot of ebooks and when they're really cheap I just buy them immediately rather than track them somewhere to go and purchase when I have time to read them later. My kindle has probably a half dozen books to read on it at the moment, and I imagine if they were $20-30 each I wouldn't be that flippant about it.

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It's the steam model.

"Why not buy this game if it's only $5?"

20 minutes, 10 purchases, and $50 later with another set of titles to stale in the library.

But there's also the iOS model to consider:

"Why buy this game if it's not $1?"

I know there's other factors at work, but this is what publishers are (understandably) afraid of.

Sure. I buy books by the bushel at $1 each (from ebay). I buy almost none at $14.99.

That sounds like an interesting model. Do you have tips you'd be willing to share? I wouldn't mind having books to read which I won't mind my young kids destroying accidentally.

Go on ebay and search for "vintage sci fi book lot". You can usually get a box of 'em for a buck each, and if you're patient, even $.50 each.

Your local thrift shop often has a pile of books for sale, and if you take a load of them off their hands, they'll usually give you a deal. I sometimes fill a couple shopping bags with sci fi books that way.

The fun thing about buying them by the bushel is poking through them, and discovering great sci fi you never knew existed. I enjoy the lurid artwork on the older ones, too.

FWIW, I've gotten dozens of used books from amazon UK in the 2£ range, which is higher but still in the destroyable-without-drama range.

I'd expect your local amazon has the same kind of resellers.

The minimum price for a physical book from Amazon is $4.00 plus sales tax. ($.01 for the book, $3.99 shipping)

This kind information (and a lot more) is effectively public already via KDP Pricing Support (Beta):

https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A22DBITFA52H1S

I imagine there's some sort of non-disclosure agreement attached to specific results (which is why I said effectively), but the universe of people that have access is so large (every KDP author), I don't think that matters much in practice - especially for general data points like this one.

That's exactly the kind of stuff we calculate at 42. Hard to see this from mountains of data in excel, especially if you're scared of the math.

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