Race to the bottom: the erosion of value in publishing by Melville House

The eroding value of books seems to be well underway in the eBook world. $2.99 and $.99 cent ebooks have begun to proliferate on Amazon.com. At CNET, David Carnoy reports on the aggressive new pricing phenomenon:

Just how many 99-cent e-books are in the Kindle Store’s Top 100 on Amazon? Well, at the time of this writing, I counted 17 e-books priced at a dollar or less on the list. If you take away the game titles, newspapers, and magazines that are on the list, you’re looking at the 99-cent e-book making up slightly more than 20 percent of the list.

As the comments on Carnoy’s article seem to indicate, consumers seem to think these price wars are good and fair. “TimGray1” writes, “I personally see that the run to zero for ebooks is a GOOD THING as it is giving the consumer the real price for the books instead of a over inflated price…”

“None of this,” writes Carnoy, “bodes well for the publishing industry. Why? Well, 99 cents and $2.99 works for self-published authors, but it’s probably not going to cut it for traditional publishers or the authors who sign on with them.”

Publishing isn’t the only industry in danger from the rise of cheaply priced products. The New York Times “Bits” blog reports that “the president of Nintendo told video game developers Wednesday that smartphones were driving a trend toward lower quality, and economically unsustainable, video games.” Satoru Iwata the Nintendo president: