Quote:
Originally Posted by CommonReader
The point is if they will make any additional money. It would be rather pointless to replace e.g. revue of 1 million € selling a book as paper book with 600,000 € selling the same book as ebook for Kindle. Will people who buy books via Kindle buy so many more books than they would have bought as paper books to make it a good business for the publishers.
This basically assumes that books are something of a commodity. If you don't get the book by author A for your Kindle you will buy the book by author B instead. Perhaps the market does work that way but I would have rather assumed that people would buy the book written by author A as a paper book instead of buying something different, just because the other book happens to be available for Kindle.
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First, it is too early to tell what the book industry will look like after the dust settles from the disruption caused by the mainstreaming of ebooks. All we have are incipient trends...
That said, the trends have the high-overhead BPHS scared spitless precisely because they fear commoditization and cannibalization. The rise of the US$0.99 ebook, the reduced BPH aggregate market share in ebooks vs print, Agency pricing, the war against libraries, the fights over author royalties; all these are hints of where the BPH fear the market is headed and how they hope to protect their bloated top-heavy operations.
What they are *not* doing is opting out of ebooks altogether.
And that is precisely because they fear long term commoditization and cannibalization; they fear being the last guy selling buggy whips. In other words, they understand that if their print book sales are to be cannibalized it is better they be cannibalized by their own high-priced ebooks rather than by somebody else's cheap ebooks.
It really doesn't matter if we think commoditization and/or cannibalization is going to happen, or the extent to which we may think it'll happen; it is enough that the BPHs fear it and are acting on that fear.
And they are acting to exploit ebook mainstreaming not ignore it.
When Amazon/Kobo/Apple come to Germany/France/Spain/Italy/Poland/etc they'll have more than enough content to stock their ebookstores.
Now, whether "when" is 2011,12, or 13 is unclear but the question is when, not if.
There is too much money at stake.
The djinn is out of the bottle.