Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan
But why? A publisher's goal is to earn money. He is doing this by selling books to customers. That is his job. He would be a fool if he would let an opportunity slip away. So why are so many publishers so reluctant to publish an ebook in a timely manner? The costs are minimal - at least compared to paper books (paper, printing, proof reading, formatting, logistics).
Alan
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I think it's about external pressures and how the pie shapes. For large scale adoption of e-books you need low prices and no drm and most publishers perceive this as a threat to their business model, so unless there is considerable external pressure they are not going to do much more than today (think music industry and how reluctantly and only due to plummeting sales of traditional cd's is moving toward digital content - and still fighting all the way including the recent court arguments about cd ripping).
The publishing industry is doing very well despite perceptions to the contrary, so it has no reason to change, hence high e-book prices and drm and negligible digital revenue.
The smaller specialized houses are the ones who will push toward e-books, but even there I just do not see a big market for them to more than scrape by with e-content; the big money still comes from print
There is a big cachet in being print published by a mainstream house (or genre house for that matter), so authors will not go independent unless they have no choice and they want to publish a book and for whatever reason they cannot get a contract for that (for established authors that happens when a series is not performing so publishers drop later volumes and then it's very, very hard to find another publisher to pick it up)