Quote:
Originally Posted by DMB
Are they really playing King Canute if they think agency pricing of ebooks will uphold dt sales?
I don't know about other e-reader owners, but since I got my Kindle (August 2010) I have bought lots of ebooks and only two dt books. I am still reading some dt books, but they are ones I bought pre-kindle.
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If they started the agency deal in an attempt to stem the tide of people switching to eReaders for lower priced ebooks rather than continuing to buy high priced hardcovers, they failed.
They probably realized they'd lost those who were early adopters of eReaders as hardcover buyers, you are likely typical in not wanting to buy any more paper books. But then they lost many of those as customers altogether, by jacking up the ebook price of their bestsellers. There are plenty of reasonably priced ebooks being offered by other publishers and self-published authors, so all they've accomplished is to open avid readers' (those early adopters) eyes to other sources of reading material beyond the few hundred bestsellers they used to read.
The second wave is that it turns out people don't need to switch to dedicated eReaders to read ebooks, half of all ebooks are read on ultra portable laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Those tech markets have exploded in the past two years, another tide threatening their precious hardcovers. Now everyone in the first world can read an ebook.