It all depends on how smart consumers are. What really seems to be a huge disconnect for me is when consumers complain about pricing. Consumers set the pricing. If 9.99 is to expensive for an e-book, don't buy any. Eventually the price will come down. It seems that as a culture, nobody can deny themselves something. If a large number of consumers just said "No" to new products until those products came down in price, you would get better pricing.
I won't read, I won't steal and I won't buy an e-book until they are about 3-5 dollars for a brand new book and free with the purchase of a hard cover copy of the book.
The little secret is that paper books cost next to nothing to bring to market as a representation of the over all percent of the actual unit price. I worked at a paper printer and an average paper back cost less than a dollar for us to make. The company charged for pretty much everything plus a 30% profit on top but even still the book ended up being about 1.50 USD to 2.00 USD and the product was ready for store shelves at that point. We had a section that could do hardcovers and they did take more money to make but the complete unit cost was under 4.00 USD. This doesn't account for storage, marketing, and development. I consider the author's compensation part of the development costs.
What you are going to see is an inflation in production, development, and marketing costs. Those should change because they are grossly over inflated already but they won't. So realistically you will see prices for movies, books, music, and games come in at close to their physical medium costs because realistically the physical media was only a small part of the original cost anyway. Consumers have always been overpaying for products but the myth of "physical production" costs tricked most consumers into accepting those inflated prices.
Another trick that most companies including media companies use is all of the ridiculous compensation packages are considered "loss" so they can report smaller "profit margins". So a company might go around and say they are operating on a 2% profit margin but you take a look at the money all of the stakeholders and upper managers are raking in and it becomes clear where most of the inflated costs are going.
A general rule of thumb I use is take a hardcover book and knock 5.00 USD off the list price. What ever is left is paying for non-tangible things and always has been paying for non-tangible things like production, development, marketing, compensation and profit. That is where mot publisher will want to sell their products or if they can get full price it is even better.
As a smart consumer, you need to just not buy at that price if you want your e-books to reflect their true value.
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