Strangely enough, his opinions dovetail nicely with Charlie Stross’s. Hmm, a successful publisher and an author differ from a department store/distribution channel owner: wonder who to listen to?
My advice to publishers and authors is this: figure out what it costs to produce what you sell, estimate what kind of volume you’ll be able to achieve using the best available data, and then set your prices at a level that will deliver a reasonable profit from your efforts. Sound familiar? That’s what you do in business today. Don’t expect any suspension of the law of gravity. Leave that to the subprime folks, who followed on the heels of the dotcommers in coming up with new math that ultimately didn’t make any sense. [From Bad Math Among eBook Enthusiasts]
This is not to say there won’t be lots o’ Kindles in this season’s holiday loot, but there were a lot of Yugos back in the day as well. Not so many anymore . . .