Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemurion
I don't agree with everything Steve has suggested; but in one very important way he's right. No one has ever proven that there has been an increase in sales due to illegal downloading. We've seen studies that may indicate that, and others that say it's not the case, but no one has proved it. Almost all the evidence is anecdotal.
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I think that more to the point is that nobody yet proved that you can make real money and build a big business selling e-books. Baen makes its money on hc's and e-books were a way to move from a mmpb house to a hc house, Fictionwise/Amazon Kindle and the like are just negligible in terms of revenue. People just do not want to pay that much overall on e-content, and while there is some pie to be split as the iTunes/mp3 experience shows, it's quite smaller than the corresponding print/cd one.
This is why I think that e-books will remain a niche market - no easy home-digitization to force publishers - more dedicated to sell print books, and if somehow despite my expectations e-books take off, the result will be similar to music, vastly declining revenues...
Piracy is irrelevant to a large extent- the tech comapnies peddling the Net and assorted products like iPods and large storage media, embedded this expectation of free/low cost e-content in the collective imagination and it ain't going away.