Co-author here. We find it to be ok price for us.

- Quantitative evidence, we have over 150+ pre-orders in the last 3 month which is more than good for us. No advertising, no social media. We sold first book 700 times. So that's 100-120 people out of 700 who pre-ordered second book.

- Qualitative evidence. We have way more polite customers after raising price in the past ($49 -> $99) for our first book. More polite emails, more feedback and less emails asking for support.

EDIT: My co-author says that we have evidence that higher percentage of people who bought the book at higher price point actually read it.

PS: Price will go to $199 on Sunday midnight PST, that's when pre-order period ends.

> More polite emails, more feedback and less emails asking for support.

Obviously. If I were to run a restaurant I would rather choose/open as expensive as I could so I wouldn't have to deal with people without proper manners and education sufficient to appreciate my fine culinary skills /semi-sarcastic

By the way. Here had already been some posts by free software authors devastated by rude and ignorant people demanding support and/or bullying them by e-mail. I find it very important for all the authors (regardless of whether they code/write for free or for serious money) to learn to just ignore (without any emotional response) the correspondence from this kind of people. You don't alienate them this way, they already got what they are eligible for for free or for their money, personal support should be a premium, for nice people only :-) Yet, there actually are many nice people for whom $100 (let alone $200) per book is a way too much. Some of them even living in the US, not necessarily in an utterly poor country.

Maybe a rent option?

No, the idea of rental of digital content is artificial and plain ridiculous, as is the idea of dividing the Internet into countries.

Except that textbook rentals have been a thing since before the internet.

Indeed. That was before the Internet. Many things were before something yet would look bizarre (which doesn't necessarily imply completely impossible) today.

Actually textbook rentals are probably even more used now with higher costing textbooks. Yes you can still rent textbooks.

Sure, this is a well-known problem. Sooner or later this bullshit business model will be eliminated.

I don't think there is any problem with the pricing but OP's point might be valid for people who live in low income countries where the cost of the book is equivalent to a month of salary.

Steam and other platforms employ prices based on purchasing power of the buyer which I think is good but also require more work which might not be worth it for smaller teams.

We haven't implemented any discount system from the beginning. We are only two and we do books only part-time.

We do get emails asking for discounts but I personally feel that it is unfair to the previous buyers.

But I am keeping an open mind about it. Is there reliable way to charge people in other countries different price?

As one person living in one of those countries with greatly reduced purchase power, I really appreciate the way Wes Bos[1] has done it for his courses (I've bought a couple of them).

He's got an episode on his podcast on how he implemented it [2].

It does sound like some work and I'm not saying you should discount or give away your work though.

[1]https://wesbos.com/ [2] https://syntax.fm/show/233/hasty-treat-purchasing-power-pari...

One time discount links is what I use for special pricing. I validate request, make and send.

This seems kind of irrational: the time and effort you spend validating every request personally probably costs more than the actual giveaway.

For me it rarely comes up. When it does I've already spent at least 60 minutes with my prospect and I respond with "no" and move on. Some folks are persistent and maybe, case by brief case, I pick.

Sometime I choose to give a deal to a person for my own reasons, so my one-off pay portal is used there as well.

Or one-off a client for additional money.

It took less than an hour to build, years ago, the functionally it's a one off invoice just tightly integrated with my business and optimised to two inputs. #bpaftw

$99 is absolutely not crazy, especially if it really does save weeks of time (as billed).