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Originally Posted by rogue_librarian
You mean apart from the chance to cash in again on books that have been out of print for many years and as such had pretty much no commercial value?
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That's the point, right? There has to be an incentive to earn cash commensurate for the effort and the opportunity cost (what else they could be doing to make money).
The notion that they can just get a darknet copy and release it is folly. A legitimate business can't just put out a file. They have to do all the legwork to ensure they have the rights. There are meetings, logistics (yes, even electronic files), legal, art, marketing. All of that takes time and money. And for what? To sell a few dozen copies per year?
Quote:
Originally Posted by rogue_librarian
I'd pay a few bucks for that, but certainly not full price, no. To give you an example: I am interested in Peter Tremayne's "Sister Fidelma" books. At $11.38, I'll pass. (I usually don't pay that much for recently released books.)
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I quite agree. Why would I pay new book price for a back list title where I can get a used copy of the paper back for quite cheap? So I know why _I_ would not be eager to pay high prices. The question remains...why would a publisher go through all that effort to sell a few of these books at cheap prices? Not to mention that these cheap books will be taking the customers time, attention and money away from the profit making products the publisher wants to sell.
For a hot and ongoing series from a still viable top selling author? Sure. Put the back list out and build the audience for the next book in the series.
Even then, there's only so much money to be made. The less liklihood that such works will earn profits, the less reason publishers have to spend their time and money making such works available.
The darknet isn't going to faze them in this scenario. The "put the books out so that folks at least pay you something verses the nothing you get when someone gets a book off the darknet" would make sense if one did not figure in the opportunity cost. You have to subtract out the folks who acquire pirated books because they have no intention of paying ANY price.
Since the potential for sales of any kind are MUCH less for an out of print backlist book under any circumstances....you would likely need to charge MORE for them, not less. That is something a lot of folks won't put up with.
The result is that the buyers don't value the product enough to pay the producers enough to make it worth their while. That's a no sale situation.
And that's why we don't have wholesale conversions of all the backlist into ebooks. And never will.
Lee