[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

And who said it is a question of one or the other?
It isn't.
It is just a matter of *managing* the transition from one platform and business model to the other. And there are dozens of publishers that are doing just that. Mostly they are small, like Amazon Publishing, but not all are small.

You are making it sound like a no brainer. It isn't. It is very hard to do, and acting like it's easy just shows that you don't really understand how businesses actually work.

Look to Harlequin and Carina; Harlequin is part of one of the BPHs but they have enough autonomy to call their own shots.
And the way they call them is by going aggressively after ebook business under both the traditional model and the New Publishing model. As Harlequin they sell from Amazon, from Nook, *and* from their own website.

Yes, let's look at Harlequin. H. has had subscription service for customers at least since the 70's. They had direct contact with the customers and shipped directly to them, bypassing the retailer. My grandmother used to subscribe; she'd get a box of Harlequins every month.

So, yeah, if you are a publisher identified with one certain type of book - so identified that people just call them "Harlequins" *and* have a 40 year history of dealing directly with you customers...then you have quite a leg up over most traditional publishers.

How does Random House do this, with their 80,000 new titles per year and no real customer identification or experience in dealing with customers?

As Carina, they run an ebook-first operation. Kinda covers all the bases, no?

There's that old business chestnut that says; "It is better to obsolete your own product (or business model) than to wait for your competitors to do it for you."

Cannibalizing your own business is usually better than sitting around doing nothing. And that is simply the worst-case scenario; the best case scenario is what Microsoft has done three times so far and is preping to do a fourth time; migrate its customer base seamlessly from one platform to another: first, from the DOS CLI to the GUI, then to the NT object-oriented code Base, more recently to 64-bit computing, and now to HTML5-driven coding. You don't survive technology-driven disruptions by ignoring them; you survive them by jumping on the bandwagon.

Except that big publishers *have* done a good job of migrating their paperbooks to e-books. They now produce e-books of almost all of their new fiction, and more and more of their backlist. This wasn't particularly easy to do, and it shows that they have not ignored technological innovations. They haven't ignore them *at all.*

And, yeah, MS has made a lot of changes to its OS over the years. But what it hasn't done is drop its prices.

Smart publishers today are the ones looking to leverage low-overhead ebook-first publishing to go after the market share of the stupid publishers who insist on doing things the 19th century way. And whining.
Musn't forget the whining and recriminations.

Publishers are tripling their e-books sales year-over-year (at least in the US), and e-books account for a small but significant part of their overall profit and revenue.

And contrary to the "dinosaur" rhetoric that is so popular on the internet, in fact they are being relentlessly innovative in trying out new business models to deal with the changing technology represented by e-books.

For example, they very quickly discarded the 19th century wholesale/retail model for e-books and replaced it with an agency model. Demonstrating, among other things, the ability to turn on a dime and take significant risks in doing so. Which seem to have paid off, although it is hard to tell.

And most publishers have also done away with the quaint 19th century custom of selling books to libraries (e-books, anyway), since they apparently feel that technological change makes this way of doing things outdated.

Fat lot of good either will do them, but that's easier than actually doing something. In the end it is easier to be a victim than a survivor.

They've done plenty. I don't necessarily agree with what they've done. But they are not brain dead morons who are unaware of what e-books represent - they have very smart people working for them who have the extra incentive that their livelihood depends on their business succeeding. But change is not easy to manage; it's really hard. Yet they do seem to be doing it, and profiting. They can't just "be like Baen" or "be like Harlequin." That won't work for big publishers who produce multiple genres. What they are doing is being creative, being innovative, and experimenting. I can't fault them for that, even though I hope that it turns out that they need library lending. (I'm skeptical that they do, though, at least for new books.)

But they aren't going to survive by selling all of their books directly to the consumer for $3.