Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
I can see the following scenario: Amazon sets up a SF Book Club, in which for $20 per month, you get to pick 4 books each month from a pool that includes their mid-list SF catalogue. You don't get the latest and the greatest, but you get the stuff from a few years ago. If you prepay the $240, you get to pick 5 books per month and you get credits and freebies the longer you are a member. There is a newsletter and a discussion forum. The authors , who don't make much money off their older books, would be on board, along with their publishers.
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That'd work wonderfully.
Do you really think a bookstore could get the Agency 6 to go along with charging only $5 for backlist ebooks, even in a subscription format? They freaked out over $10 ebooks. Their current idea of backlist midlist prices is
$10 for the first of a series first published in 1986, where most of the series isn't (legitimately) available digitally at all.
$8 for one outside of a series, originally from '92.
As far as I know, the only big publishers willing to sell most of their ebooks at $5 or less are romance publishers.
$20/month for 4-5 books from a reasonably genre-focused pool of books would be great; ebook readers would jump on it. But the publishers show no signs of being willing to accept less than full mm paperback face price for ebooks.