A benchmark event occurred today

May 18, 2010 - 6:03pm — Bibliofuture

Publishing industry consultant Mike Shatzkin:

We’ve been imagining a split market for ebooks: “branded” ones from conventional publishers being sold in the $10-$15 range and “commodity” ones from lesser-known sources (authors and publishers) at $1.99 and $2.99. Over time, we figured that improved curation of the cheaper ones, plus promotional pricing by the branded ones, would drag the overall pricing down. That’s been behind our concern that maintaining anything close to the current pricing for print will be almost impossible to do over time.

I think “over time” just became more compressed as a result of Konrath’s move.

Full blog entry here