Quote:
Originally Posted by whitearrow
The problem is that big publishers haven't historically considered their customers to be readers, but the retailers they dealt with on a day to day basis. It's retailers they've marketed to in order to get prime store space, and retailers they've tried to impress with their newest offering. Even getting publishers to think readers are actually important to their business is an entirely new mindset for them.
Their resistance to ebooks is evidence of this, because they are resisting with all their might, despite how much readers demonstrably want ebooks available. Their tone-deafness on pricing, the inability to contact a human at a publisher directly when you find an ebook with problems, all of it -- as unbelievable as it seems, the BPH's still don't seem to get that the people who actually read the books are really important to their business.
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Er, Mike Shatzkin had a post on this very topic , which I will just link to without commenting, since apparently I shiould stop linking to or quoting folks who actually know the publishing business.
http://www.idealog.com/blog/should-t...or-a-b2c-world
Long story, he thinks publishers should ditch " imprint" names like "Knopf' and "Crown" instead of just "Random House".
As for Ebooks, publishers have embraced ebooks. Thjey just haven't embraced pricing schemes that their analysts tell them would inflict substantial losses on themselves and the authors they represent.