Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Publishers who believe that backlist ebooks are competing with new-printing pbooks are delusional. They're competing with penny-plus-shipping Amazon used books, with Bookmooch.com, and with local yard sales. Publishers never got royalties from those sales; it shouldn't surprise them or affect their bottom line when those would-be buyers turn to torrents and file-exchange sites for a copy that's within their price range. The publishers still have the same level of profit: zero.
They have an opportunity to get profit from those readers--by competing with used book prices, not new ones. Otherwise, they can continue to fail to get income from 3/4 of the readers of any particular book.
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I think you hit the nail on the head from the consumer point of view. Anyone who is willing to read either paper (used or new) or electronic is going to pick the best price available, and that won't be electronic in most cases.
I think the problem is that these 30/40/50 year old books don't exist in digital form and it's no cheaper to scan/proofread/typeset a 50 year old book than it is to do the same work for a newer book. A new book at least exists in a digital format already. (I assume so anyway - do publishers still accept type-written manuscripts?)
Of course, in a lot of cases pubishers could just torrent those older books and cut out some of the work. I'd find an amusing bit of irony in that.
Eventually the market and the scanning/proofing technology will meet and we'll be seeing dead-author bundles for reasonable prices. I hope.