I agree with everything your saying, its a real art though to find that sort of golden price point where the most profit can be made with the lowest price (its hard to raise prices). But making any sort of product for Apple 2 users and enthusiats is not exactly trying to making millions and odds are you may lose money. I have to feel that expecting really low prices is sort of delusional unless the guy just gives up and decides to cut his losses and run which is not good for the community. If everyone in America suddenly got into buying telescopes (my other obsession) I would expect the high prices of my other hobby to come down, but I am not holding my breath on that one either (science is sort of look at scornfully these days in America) and I just pay the high number knowing that there just arent that many amateur astronomers I am just glad that people even consider tiny markets like the Apple ][ to make product as most of these guys are enthusiats who deserve to certainly not have to lose money, I cant really expect them to be dumping stuff for a market that may only be a few hundred people in total if EVERYONE purchased.
And as the price comes down, the number of sales goes up. Pricing theory is about finding the price which will, as a result of this "elasticity" of the market, maximize total profit. Since all the effort required to make all the copies (except plopping a $0.20 DVD in a burner) is already spent, the question isn't how much trouble it was to create it, but how much it's worth to the largest number of potential buyers. Put another way, "sunk cost" is irrelevant. A well-worn rule of thumb is that the price that marks the start of the "impulse buy" range is the price of a pizza. ;-) So I'm guessing that if the price dropped to $24.95, he'd sell over a hundred of them--all but $1 + $1 postage would be *pure profit*! (BTW, I already bought mine. ;-) -michael NadaPong: Network game demo for Apple II computers! Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."