Quote:
Originally Posted by elcreative
As far as relating it to books, well I'm simply reading more again... and I'm not a millionaire either but my criteria for buying a book have always been amazingly simple, "Does that book seem like I might enjoy it?" Answer yes then buy it, answer no then don't... short of cash then don't look...
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Are you really saying you don't consider whether a book is three dollars or thirty before you buy it? Or that when you look for a new book to read, you snap up the first one you "might enjoy" without considering if there's another you might enjoy more?
Since I have access to more ebooks than I can read in my lifetime, I have to be selective about which ones I read, and since I have a budget, more selective about which ones I buy. If I had fewer millions of books to choose from, I might reconsider my criteria.
I can: pay $13 for a new ebook from Amazon (if I dealt with DRM),
Pay $6 for something from Baen, and start read my ebook while eating lasagne at the diner for lunch.
Pay $0 for a collection of fanfic or an rss feed of blog posts, and go out to a movie on the weekend.
So far, the benefits of Option 1 have never seemed to outweigh the other two.
Is it a "lost sale" every time I read fanfic instead of buying an ebook?
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I didn't say that every book should be a purchased one, I said that a free book is a lost sale... it is... it may lead to other sales in the future or it may not but at the instant that a book is acquired for free then it isn't being purchased... simple English... sale = exchange of value (usually money) for item being sold, no exchange then no sale...
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A free book is "no sale;" that's not the same as a
lost sale. To "lose" something, you had to have it, or at least the possibility of it, in the first place.
A free book is no more a lost book sale than a carpool is a lost car sale. Just because someone will accept something for free, doesn't mean they would've bought it if it wasn't free. The sale isn't "lost" if it never would've happened in the first place.
The choice often is not:
- Free book; author doesn't get paid.
- Paid book; author gets a royalty.
More often, it's:
- Free book; author gets some attention.
- No book; author gets ignored.