Quote:
Originally Posted by elizilla
One of the things I watch for, in the bargains and freebies area, are cheap editions of books I already own on paper and love.
I probably own a couple of thousand paper books. I'd pay a buck or two each to own ebook copies of some large percentage of them, at which point I could shed the weight of all this paper. But at $10 to $15 apiece, I'm not going to buy anything unless I want to read it now.
It seems to me that if publishers made large numbers of backlist titles available in bargain editions, they'd pull a lot of buyers like me out of the woodwork. And since the marginal cost of each ebook is close to zero, it seems like they would be better off selling 2000 copies for $2 each, than selling 200 copies for $10 each.
Maybe someday...
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I'm with you, except that there are costs associated with getting those backlist titles out.
I would like to see publishers offer some incentive for buying backlist titles in digital form--as some studios did for upgrades from VHS to DVD, and from DVD to Blu-ray. Disney, for example, would e-mail a coupon for something like $8 to $10 off the Blu-ray movie if you sent them the SKU code of your earlier version. With that incentive, I rebought a lot of Disney titles I otherwise wouldn't have gotten, and donated the earlier versions. Seems like it was a win-win situation.