Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
That's true, but, with respect, even if you personally cannot buy it, you must surely acknowledge it is a good thing that it is available to many people.
|
It depends on whether you're looking at it in the short run or the long run or the longer run or the longer-run-with-hindsight.
In the short run, some books are being made available to some people, which would seem to be a net gain.
However, in the long run, if the exclusivity prompts competitors to lock up their own backlist titles with exclusive deals, the gain is not so clear. Again, some ebooks are being made available to some people, but at the cost of confusion in the marketplace.
At this point, people who are trying to choose an ereader will be faced with the daunting task of choosing A) the reader they want, and B) the store they want based in part on C) the books they want, since each outlet now has its own exclusives.
The result in similar situations in the past has been for large numbers of people to throw their hands in the air and sit it all out and wait for the dust to settle and not buy anything, which is bad for ebooks.
Eventually, in the longer run, the dust does settle somehow (someone's format dominates, or some form of cross-compatibility emerges, or the outlets get tired of chasing exclusives as the cost ramps up exponentially, or a combination of all of the above) and we end up with nearly all of the books available to everyone, which is good.
But, in the longer-run-with-hindsight, everyone sees that if they'd just cooperated a little bit initially instead of going for each other's throats like rabid jackals, they could have arrived at the same point a lot sooner and spent a lot less money getting there with a lot less aggravation.
Whew.