Quote:
Originally Posted by J. Strnad
It sounds as if you're thinking of books as commodities, like bushels of wheat, where you might as well buy this one as that one. In some cases you'd be right, and you might as well read this genre book as that genre book. Prices will be most competitive in this area.
In other cases the author works to build his/her "brand" so that the book is not easily replaceable by any other. These books can maintain higher price points.
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No author can write fast enough keep up with my reading; there's *always* a level of "I'm going to read [this] because [that other thing I really want] isn't available right now." Because of this, readers have always treated books somewhat like commodities.
There's an understanding among many (most?) avid readers that reading the new novel RIGHT AWAY is not crucially important... that if it weren't available for another six months, they'd be reading something else, so reading something else today is not a great hardship in the long run. (In the short run, not reading it NOW means missing out on the early hype and possibly running into spoilers, so there is incentive to buy it full price new.)
But we've all read great books years after they were published, and years after anyone we knew was talking about them. And we've all *not* read some great book that everyone we knew read and loved.
The more voracious the reader, the more likely they are to treat books as commodities, the more likely that they want to be reading *something* rather than "this particular thing." The "Big 6" publishers seem to miss that point entirely. Of course, they also seem to think that "voracious reader" means "15 books/year," so their conclusions are understandably skewed.