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Old 12-10-2010, 06:40 PM   #3
Elfwreck
Grand Sorcerer
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Posts: 5,185
Karma: 25133758
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: SF Bay Area, California, USA
Device: Pocketbook Touch HD3 (Past: Kobo Mini, PEZ, PRS-505, Clié)
66% have no clear idea if they're even making money from ebook sales

Ebooks don't fit their current economic models. The cost of making them is unknown (do they count just the handful of hours it takes to reformat the print-ready version, or do they split the full production costs among hardcover, trade, mm & ebook versions?); the costs of distribution are hard to calculate (how much does server space & payment processing cost, anyway?), the costs of advertising are incomprehensible. Of course they don't know whether or not the money they've made selling ebooks--which they could certainly describe in great detail, if they wished--counts as "profit" for the concept of ebooks.

It's a new marketplace. If an ebook doesn't sell well, is that because the public doesn't like that title, or because they offered it only at Amazon and most of that author's readers are ePub fans? They know how to decide which books to release only as MMPB and which ones they believe will have hardcover appeal; they don't know how that works with ebooks yet. They don't know how many projected sales would make a book worth releasing as an ebook.

And--heh--they really don't know how to deal with direct public feedback, and how to consider the costs of that as part of the books' economy.
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