Quote:
Originally Posted by hardcastle
I was more discussing Amazon's push to get back catalogs of authors into a common marketplace, which the article discussed for several paragraphs. I feel that the modern commerce model requires not only access to recent but also semi-recent and older books. The older concept of "only the classics stay stocked" seems narrow-sighted; a book could bomb but then suddenly become relevant after a major political movement a decade later.
However, I will note that Amazon is not the only one capable of this. Anyone with a grasp of the internet could have predicted the increased availability that would follow. I only noted my support of Amazon's execution of the idea in a list of many reactions to a long and complex article detailing a long and complex situation.
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The problem is that the publishers are not interested in stocking the older backlist unless it's a best selling classic. The backlist is a distraction from their brand new spiffy bestseller wannabee for which they've just shelled out $50k or more for author advance, preprint preparation (editing, etc.), and the fewer alternatives available to readers, the better. For example, does it make economic sense for Tor to sell Isaac Asimov books from the 1940s/50s as $10 ebooks ($1 more than most of their recent live author ebooks) except that they're selling a trade paperback for $16, and they want people to think that *all* ebooks should be priced like a brand new book?
Amazon doesn't really care if these backlist books sell for $4 or $10, but the publishers do, and they want them to sell for $10.