View Single Post
Old 03-02-2008, 01:53 PM   #21
Trenien
Groupie
Trenien could sell banana peel slippers to a Deveel.Trenien could sell banana peel slippers to a Deveel.Trenien could sell banana peel slippers to a Deveel.Trenien could sell banana peel slippers to a Deveel.Trenien could sell banana peel slippers to a Deveel.Trenien could sell banana peel slippers to a Deveel.Trenien could sell banana peel slippers to a Deveel.Trenien could sell banana peel slippers to a Deveel.Trenien could sell banana peel slippers to a Deveel.Trenien could sell banana peel slippers to a Deveel.Trenien could sell banana peel slippers to a Deveel.
 
Trenien's Avatar
 
Posts: 173
Karma: 3277
Join Date: Jun 2007
Device: Librie, eReader, Kobo Glo
Quote:
Um.... Baen has shown that eBooks are nicely profitable in their own right, even when they pay their full share of the fixed costs of publication. When sold as part of a WebScriptions bundle (everything Baen publishes in a particular month, minimum four books never before in bits, for $15) both publisher and author do somewhat better than on a paperback sale in the bookstore. At the single-copy price of $6, publisher and author do better than large-format paperback, and almost as well as hardcover.
Agreed, but when I was talking about "earning a living", it's Baen I had in mind. One author (I don't remember who) did say he got a nice income from the Baen ebook store, but the amount wouldn't have been enough by itself (around $2000 if I remember well).


Quote:
eSales have also helped drive paper sales, as has the Baen Free Library.
My point exactly.

Quote:
Some argue that this is the more important effect overall, but I've not heard that particular argument from insiders with real numbers at their fingertips.
A couple of real life examples would tend to indicate that is true.


As a whole, I feel like the Baen ebook store is probably making money because of the convenience I talked about in a previous post:
- The books aren't too expensive
- No DRM
- They are in quite a lot of of format, many of which are easy to convert if you need to.

I have a counter-example as well: my wife is Japanese, an avid reader but can only really enjoy it in Japanese only (for now). We recently moved from Japan, which meant she wouldn't have an easy access to books (in Japanese).
My librie could natively read/display Japanese characters, so I gave it to her and bought myself a sony reader (the prs500 being relatively cheap). We expected her to buy/rent books from the sony store (for those who don't know, the other main difference between the librie and the reader is that the librie reads lrs/lrf files only). Problem solved, I thought.
Wrong! Dead wrong!
Unfortunately, we both run linux on our computers. Since the sony store exclusively allows you to download the books you buy through their windows only software, that means having to jump through hoops to be able to buy any book - never mind the fact that it actually would be much more convenient to just download the book and upload it on the memory card, as opposed to having to plug the librie to the computer as it is now.
End result: she expected spending around 5000/10000 yens a month at that store and ended up not buying one book (and I sure as hell won't buy another sony reader if I have a choice).

Last edited by Trenien; 03-02-2008 at 02:53 PM.
Trenien is offline   Reply With Quote