Quote:
Originally Posted by boxcorner
So, selling e-books is a different kind of business that requires fresh thinking. Publishers would be better off if they considered it to be entirely different kind of business, instead of trying to tack it onto their existing business model.
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Yes, this.
It's a new business model that will cannibalize hardcover sales, just like publishers fear: some people who used to buy hardcovers will buy ebooks instead, for various reasons. (And some who used to buy hardcovers but now prefer ebooks will at the same time feel that ephemeral ebooks are not worth the same price as hefty, well-designed hardcovers, and therefore won't pay hardcover prices for them. Maybe they'll wait for the price to drop, download it from the public library or forgo the book entirely in disgust over the publishers' attempts to charge more for something than it feels like it's worth. These are the tools, along with griping in public forums and/or directly to the publisher, that we as consumers have at our disposal.)
On the other hand, making up for the decreased hardcover sales and for the market pressure that could force ebook prices down to what the market deems a reasonable price, some people who used to buy used books--people from whom publishers previously derived little to no income--will start buying ebooks, because you can't read a used paperback on your nifty ebook reader without more prep work than the average person is willing to do.
The smart publisher is pricing their backlists to appeal to these people. Look, publishers can't afford to sell print backlist books for just a little above used book prices because every copy of a print book is saddled with printing, transportation, warehousing and display space costs. They could go POD for their backlists to eliminate warehousing and display space costs, but it raises their print costs, so it's more or less a wash. But ebooks don't have these costs, and what costs they may have--scanning & OCR, typesetting, proofreading--are amortized across the total sales of the book: the more copies you sell, the lower the cost/copy. [Aside: I know this is also the case with printing costs, but with printing you have to decide ahead of time on what price break to take--choose too high a quantity and you pay less/copy but risk having to transport and warehouse and/or destroy unsold copies; choose too low and you pay more/copy and risk having to do a future print run, also at a higher cost/copy unless demand--and your second run--turns out to be huge.] So, with an ebook, the more the publisher sells, the less each copy costs them. I'm not arguing for 50-cent books, but the publishers who figure out the sweet spot for backlist books, which is likely somewhere between a used book price and a new backlist paperback price, are the ones who are going to get the business from this potentially rather large NEW MARKET.
And from there it wouldn't be difficult to get a portion of this NEW MARKET to purchase new release ebooks IF they're priced in accordance with the market value of new release EBOOKS and not new release hardcovers.
The publishers who recognize and take advantage of the fact that ebooks are a different business model are the ones positioned to see ebooks overtake hardcovers as their big income generators. The publishers who cling to the old paradigm...will we really miss them when they've gone out of business and our favorite authors are being published by someone else?
(Or--yeah, what Jan Strnd said while I was busy typing up this long-winded post.)