Dual-Channel Prcing Strategy Of Paper Books And E-Books In The Internet Environment

Nowadays, with the rapid development of the Internet, shopping online has become a common way for people and e-books, as a special digital goods, has becoming more and more popular. The appearance of Amazon’s Kindle reader series changed the situation that the electronic reading developed slowly, becoming a turning point of the development of e-books. There is even a trend that the sales of e-book surpass paper book. However, there isn’t a uniform standard and model of e-book pricing. Sometimes, the price of e-book is controlled by publisher and sometime controlled by the sales channel. As a result, the study of e-book pricing appears essential. This paper studied the pricing model and duel-channel model of e-books and paper books. In this paper, e-books are not directly sold by publishers but by channels. The publisher and channel have three choices, sell only paper books, only e-books or both. This paper studied the optimal pricing strategy of publishers and retailers in the above three circumstance, analyzed how publishers and retailers should do to meet their own demand and promote the development of e-books. This paper also studied how customers’acceptance of e-book will impact on the publisher and sales channel’s best decisions.