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Originally Posted by bgalbrecht
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.
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Publishers would have to be incredibly foolish to think that a consumer is
only looking at just their supply of books. A consumer doesn't only look at Tor books unless they're a fan of Tor, and you only make a fan of someone with your backlog.
But even if it didn't make sense from a publisher's standpoint, I still think that publisher backlogs should be entirely available anyway. It should always be a compromise between the consumers, distributors, publishers, and authors.
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Actually, pretty soon the beancounters at BPH HQ will run the numbers and realize the way to achieve the best profit margin is to fire 99.99% of the staff and milk the backlist until those 100-year copyrights expire. Why invest in risky new content when they own tens of thousands of proven sellers?
That's what happened with MGM, UNITED ARTISTS, RKO RADIO, REPUBLIC, ETC.
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Not much in the way of growth, though. Risk-reward. Movies have the benefit of format shifting constantly; books are in the middle of the only format shift they might ever see.