Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob
I disagree with the above. Publishers could easily sell directly via the web.
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That is indeed what Baen have done, via Webscription.
Here's the problem: Baen is an eight or nine person company, privately owned (although a 30% stake is owned by Tor), and Jim ruled his private company with a whim of iron. If he said "frog", people hopped.
If there was a large publisher than ran on the same basis and had an enlightened despot at the top who was willing to gamble a million or two on setting up a webscription work-alike, then yes, it could be made to work.
The trouble is, there's no in-house track record for selling large numbers of ebooks at these places; everybody "knows" that ebooks Don't Sell, so there's no point throwing good money away trying to fix the problem. (If you've ever worked in a large company, they all run internally on the rule "not invented here" -- it's a big up-hill battle to get them to acknowledge external reality.)
If you try to get a big publishing conglomerate to set up its own ebook direct sales arm and sell straight to the public, you will run into internal opposition from Legal ("but what about our contracts?!?"), from Marketing ("we don't know how to sell things this way!"), from Sales ("this is going to put us out of a job if it works -- how do we deal with it?"), from Production ("you want us to do *what*?") and so on, all the way down the line. The only people who don't have an axe to grind are Editorial (which is good), but everyone else is so invested in the current publishing model that they expect to lose out -- either to lose money on a doomed experiment, or by being out of a job (if their job is contingent on keeping the existing supply chain in being).
Let me add: I'm both an author and an ebook consumer and a Linux gearhead. I want to see cheap, DRM-free ebooks available easily on every platform in non-proprietary formats. I want to see authors able to earn a living and publishers able to stay in business. I want a chicken in every pot. Alas, the publishing industry is broken, and it is broken for
good historical reasons. Un-breaking it will be very hard, and will inevitably put a lot of people out of work (mostly in the wholesale warehouses and supply chain). Given that nobody wants to be put out of work due to massive rationalization and downsizing in the industry they're part of, they're going to fight back.
So it's going to be messy, if it happens at all.