Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemurion
If commercial publishers fail, something very similar will arise to replace them.
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I'm starting to wonder if traditional publishing might recapitulate what happened to the computer business.
In the 1970's and 80's, companies like Digital Equipment Corporation were prominent. DEC was once the second largest computer company in the world after IBM , and their VAX minicomputer running the VMS OS was popular and widely installed.
The problem was, hardware got steadily faster and cheaper. It became possible to buy a "super micro" for $25,000 to perform that same sorts of tasks done by a VAX costing $250,000. DEC designed a super micro of their own - the Alpha - but sales didn't ramp up fast enough to stem the losses as customers migrated to cheaper solutions. DEC sold off various parts to survive, and what was left was eventually bought by Compaq, which was in turn bought by HP. HP made minicomputers, too, but had eggs in a lot of other baskets, and weren't driven under by slowing mini-computer sales. HP still sells and supports the last OpenVMS iteration of DEC's flagship OS and services shops still running DEC gear, but DEC is long gone.
eBooks are an increasing part of the publishing industry. But eBooks are also
cheaper than most comparable paper books. Yet the underlying cost of acquiring a title and preparing if for publication is the same, regardless of the form in which it's issued, and an editor I know estimates the manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution costs for a title to be about 10% of the total budget for the average book. The cost savings of not having a print edition are nowhere near as large as a lot of ebook fans believe, so there are definite limits to how low the price of an ebook might be.
And the biggest limiting factor on book sales isn't price - it's discretionary
time. Reading books competes with all the other things the reader might be doing instead, such as watching TV. I don't expect the market for books to significantly expand just because they are ebooks, even if they have no cost at all. People will acquire and read what they have time for.
So what happens if publishers wind up selling the same total number of books, but the ones they
do sell are cheaper, and yield less revenue and profit? How many publishers could
survive a shift to entirely electronic publication?
We may see publishers begun as pure ebook publishers with lower cost structures cannibalizing the market and traditional publishers fading away.
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Dennis