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Originally Posted by stonetools
Well, they know that the book buying public will pay agency prices for premium talent. They were right about that.
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No, the "book-buying public" they had in the past will pay agency prices. I am part of the ebook-buying public, and I won't. "Premium talent" is a slippery term, and I certainly don't trust Macmillan to know what I'm willing to pay extra for.
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You should also understand that it takes a LOT of money to do the R&D and to build out the infrastructure for the new money and that investment money comes out of current sales.
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R&D should be built into the overhead operating costs. It's not like "changes in communications and media technology" is a new concept that just sprang up a couple of years ago, and publishers didn't have to deal with it before that. I'm not buying "prices have to go up so we can afford to do the internet properly." *My* income didn't go up so I could adapt to the internet. Publishers will have to deal with my discretionary income limits.
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When people talk about new media, you get the impression that its all unicorns and rainbows that don't have to be paid for because the Internet changed everything. However, servers and programmers and bandwidth and developers all have to be paid for.
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What indication do we have that (agency-pricing) publishers are trying to acquire new customers instead of selling new products to their previous customers and trying to maintain their income that way?
Their actions make them seem pretty fixed on the idea that their pool of potential customers hasn't changed, and every dollar spent on .epub instead of hardcover is lost profit, instead of recognizing the huge pool of potential .epub buyers who were never potential hardcover buyers.
Noticing those readers doesn't take an R&D budget. Figuring out how to market to them will take research--but they have marketing departments, and they can just shift the staff from whatever areas they believe are no longer profitable. Like, whoever was designing Borders ads & catalogs.