Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
People keep saying this, but it's not true. E-book publishers may have made their own mistakes but they have *not* made the mistakes that music publishers made.
The mistake music publishers made was that they *did not provide a convenient, legal way to buy digital music*. Not that they charged too much money, or set monopoly prices. They simply did not make the music available at all. Music publishing's problems were *never* about how much they charged for digital downloads, no matter how much people who don't like the cost of e-books would like for it to be.
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I agree with your specific example (that pricing is not what the ebook industry is doing wrong - for the most part at least). I disagree with your opening sentence that "they have *not* made the mistakes that music publishers made".
The DRM fiasco is the single greatest mistake the music industry made. Wonder of wonders, they actually fixed it. Yes, they had to be dragged to it kicking and screaming and they only did it because it was pretty much provide unDRM'd mp3s and make money or let Napster do it for them. Still,
they fixed it, which is no mean feat for an industry with all the grace and inertia of a minor star cluster. THIS is the mistake that the ebook industry has adopted. Customers flock to Baen
primarily because they don't infect their books with DRM and make several formats available and you can download all the formats if you so wish (at no extra cost). The low book prices is an added bonus and a show of faith on the part of Baen that they are actually taking advantage of all that this medium has to offer and passing on some of the savings to the customer.
I like Amazon's pricing (and B&N, since they both seem to have observers matching each others' prices
) just fine, but to me, it was once the epitome of retailing. Prior to the release of Kindle, Amazon was the source of everything you'd ever want to buy. They still are, but with the notable exception of ebooks. As far as ebooks are concerned, most of the big names are device shills. Baen isn't - it's as simple as that.
The ebook industry has fallen for the marketing hacks' insistence on calling ebooks "content" to be "managed" and "licensed". That's their major mistake. Georestriction (this time, an MPAA blunder) is yet another mistake adopted from the RIAA/MPAA cabal.