Quote:
Originally Posted by vaughnmr
From what I was seeing, the non-agency folks did a LOT better than the cartel. And in my area, a LOT of non-techie ebook readers are aware of the high prices and don't like it. Combine that with the fact that in some cases the cartel broke the promise to drop prices when pbook is released, and I think this will be an interesting year for them.
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Much as I'd like to believe that, I think we've got another year or two before mainstream buyers really notice the problems with DRM and agency pricing. Last year saw a serge in e-readers; this year, they were a common gift item--but most of the people who got them don't even know that they can get ebooks in places other than the store attached to their devices.
It'll take a while for that information to spread out to people who haven't been avidly following ebook news for much of the last decade.
I think that it *will* get out, and torrents and fileswap methods for ebooks will quietly grow, because publishers will rant about Those Evil Pirates but try hard not to mention any details (because any details they mention can be googled & lead to more Evil Piracy). And of course, they won't mention the indie ebook stores, because those don't have DRM and the big publishers refuse to be carried in them--which means that, as people discover indie stores and legit free ebook sites, they'll feel the publishers have been trying to hide the competition from them.
And then there's the hassle of tracking down a torrent for a free PDF of an ebook they bought on Amazon but won't work on their new Nook, which they didn't understand before they gave the Kindle to their cousin (and they think that's "not piracy," it's just "replacing what they already bought") (because the anti-piracy rants don't describe piracy because they don't want to tell people how to do it)...
The Big 6 publishers are doing a cracking job of building the foundations of both the underground and the independent markets that will soon be their solid competition. And when those are well-established, mainstream prices will drop, amidst much yelling about how "piracy" is destroying the future of publishing. (There will be no mention of how having access to 10,000 books published over the last 50 years means you might not be interested in the two dozen that publisher released *this* year.)