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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
That depends on how tiny a slice of the market it is.... The international market for English language titles alone is more than sufficient to be seen as valuable.
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It's not about the size of these markets. It's an issue of the likely rates of return, the costs of doing international business and the most effective use of scarce capital (aka "opportunity cost.")
For example, let's say B&N has $10 million to spend in an effort to increase their ebook revenues. They could spend it on US education, and leverage their existing systems, college stores and connections, and increase profits (not revenues, but profits) by $20 million over the next year.
Or, they could spend $10 million, and barely make a dent in the UK where they are (I presume) unknown. They'll have to spend a lot of that on UK office space, accountants, taxes, advertising, web servers, wireless contracts, customer service ("Why can't I get book X in the UK, they have it in the US") and so on.
Amazon is already doing lots of business abroad, so I am assuming several of the hard parts were already done. All they had to do was clear up what they could sell with the publishers, modify their databases, and Bob's Yer Uncle.
I might add we've already seen Waterstones drop international ebook sales. Although the reasons are still unclear, I'd assume the reason why they aren't throwing millions into the international markets is that it's too complex and/or expensive and/or has a low ROI.
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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
And I expect publishers to increasingly push for global electronic rights on titles they acquire, with geo-restrictions increasingly a thing of the past.
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I have serious doubts that "one publisher, global rights" will end up as the solution to the geo-restrictions issues.
A US publisher is probably not going to be the optimal company to translate and market an English book abroad. However large the "International English" market is, it's highly unlikely that 90% of French citizens will prefer to read an ebook in English than in French. (Or: Who do you want as your customers -- the 35% of French citizens who read English, or the 95% that read French?) Small publishers in particular will be ill-equipped to handle those tasks.
The US company also won't have a clue how to really push sales abroad. Heck, consider the Harry Potter books; they were in English to start with, and still had separate publishers for the US and UK.
The authors may also take the "international rights" opportunity to get another advance and/or a higher royalty rate.
And, of course, you still have decades of existing international contracts that are unlikely to be broken, bought out and/or forgotten. So if every new book had one global publisher, you'd still have the issues outstanding for almost the entire back catalog.
The only authors who will grant a single publisher all international rights are the ones with bad lawyers and/or no interest in significant overseas sales.