Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
There were people who were sure that Microsoft would be leading the ebook revolution. Where are they now? Others thought that Rocketbooks would be the dominant bookstore. Remember them? If we were to roll the tape back to 2006, who would have thought Amazon would be king of the ebook hill? Who had even heard of Kobo? Who would have thought that Borders would be no more? Who would have thought that tens of millions of people would be reading ebooks on Apple and Google devices?
I am quite certain that every one of those here who attack the publishers for getting it wrong have missed those too , looking forward from 2003 or even 2006.
|
They may not have been able to predict the specifics, but knowing "ebooks gonna be BIG" didn't take a huge amount of foresight.
Twenty years ago, there was no predicting that everybody would have a cellphone, much less that they'd have games, books, songs and movies on them. However, pagers were common enough that the phone industry could figure out that "device you carry that gets messages" was a solid marketing niche.
Figuring out "people will want to read on the newest techie devices" should've been a no-brainer, right along with "students want to not carry 80 lbs of books" and "people with poor eyesight would love something with variable text size" and "romance readers will churn through as many titles a month as you can deliver to them." None of these are surprising facts, and extrapolating a viable marketing strategy based on them should've been cake.
*Was* cake, to some publishers... Harlequin's doing great. O'Reilly's doing great. Dozens of tiny publishers are doing well; some are doing great. If the BPHs are not increasing income as much as those... they're not paying attention to their market. (They thought they were selling books to distributors. They forgot that the reason distributors buy them, is that readers want to read them. If readers prefer something else, distributors stop buying from publishers.)