Dear Michael Pietsch,
Amazon just notified me of your "illegal collusion" to discourage millions of poor people from reading?
How will you discourage millions of people from reading?
When you overprice ebooks out of the reach of the poor majority who cannot even afford to pay $10 for paperbacks, then how can they afford $14.99 or $19.99 for a copy of ebook?
Overpricing books, movies and tapes is what caused piracy of intellectual property and made pirates to become millionaires from their ill-gotten riches.
In Africa, only the middle class and upper class are buying and reading books, because the poor masses cannot afford them and would rather go for the pirated copies on the streets. And also most of the millions of unsold copies of printed books end up abandoned in warehouses and millions of dollars have been lost over the years. But Print on Demand (PoD) and ebooks have saved publishers from the loss of millions of dollars in unsold books.
What matters most to authors is for readers to read their books and for every copy of unsold books there is a reader that could not afford it. And the publishing industry has been at the receiving end of the downturn in sales of books in print. And ebooks have saved many publishers from bankruptcy and the best we can do is to make ebooks more accessible and available and the only way we can do so is to make ebooks more affordable to the majority of readers. The cheaper the ebooks the better for publishers, authors and readers, because more ebooks will be sold.
Affordability increases profitability
Please stop working so hard to overcharge for ebooks. They can and should be less expensive.
Lowering e-book prices will help – not hurt – the reading culture, just like paperbacks did.
Michael, let us do the right thing, so that readers will not see us as greedy people.
Your cooperation and support for our united cause to make ebooks the most affordable copies of publications would be highly appreciated.
Faithfully,
Ekenyerengozi Michael Chima
https://plus.google.com/+MichaelChimaEkenyerengozi
Author of Scarlet Tears of London, Diary of the Memory Keeper, Bye, Bye Zimbabwe, The Prophet Lied, Nollywood Mirror Series, and other books in paperback, hardcover and ebook versions.
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