Quote:
Originally Posted by Fbone
Please don't take offense but it isn't really the author's or publisher's fault if your budget is "$5/bag" or similar. You can't expect a publisher to sell you a hot-off-the-press bestseller through Borders for a $1. Even most DRM-free ebooks from an Indie will set you back a few bucks. To be honest even indie prices vary from $0.99 - $8.99 and rising.
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My budget isn't $5/bag, but that's how I often discovered several new authors at once. For $5-10/book, I stick to material I'm fairly sure I'll like--especially if I don't have the legitimate option of handing it to a friend if I didn't care for it. At $7 each, I don't buy new books because the cover & blurb sounded interesting.
And yeah, that's a problem with my budget and not the ebook industry. But the fact that I don't hand along my recommendations, because I can't legitimately say, "I liked this; here, you read it & see if you like it," is the industry's problem.
Without any free/cheap sharing options, authors and publishers are stuck doing a lot of advertising that isn't necessary for print books because of the used book market. There isn't any ebook equivalent of "moving out of parents house and into my own apartment; never reading these again--here, you take three boxes of books and see if you like them"--and deciding that one or two of those authors, you like very much and want to buy their newer books.
Right now, ebooks are piggybacking on the print industry for publicity; that's not going to work for e-only publishers.
Even new, single-novel authors benefit from the exchange of older books; if someone's book is advertised as "like Heinlein's early works!" or "if you liked
The Shining, this will blow you away!" those let readers know something about whether they'd like it.