No insult intended about your reading habits: I check out dailycheapreads.com and the Freebies forum here constantly.
Shatzkin foresees thusly:
Quote:
I am guessing that a very high proportion of the owners of self-published and small press books will find the proposition attractive from the beginning. How the big publishers would react is less certain. My belief is that the smart ones will try it: put in some titles, perhaps from their deep backlist, to get some visibility as to how the program would work.
Meanwhile, the consumers who do this will determine the course of events from there. It seems possible that the impact of this offer will be similar to the impact of the e-ink readers: the heaviest book consumers will see the greatest financial merit in the proposition. And just like customers for Amazon Prime (one annual fee for shipping) and Kindle or Nook owners are highly resistant to buying outside those programs, customers for this subscription service would largely be lost to other book consumption. It will take a more powerful desire to read any one particular book to make it a purchase outside the subscription than it takes to buy it now.
So that, in turn, will drive more books into the program. Authors, and therefore their agents, won’t want to be left out. The early entrants to the program will reap a relative bonanza because they’re on a shelf with less competition which will drive further expansion of the title base.
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So he sees it evolving in a stepwise fashion, with the indies leading the way and the Agency 6 putting in some titles, probably genre fiction, first.If it catches fire,and (given the enthusiastic reaction to Baen, it likely will) , then there will be a rush to get in.