Quote:
Originally Posted by bgalbrecht
The BPH are used to dealing with the competition being a couple thousand books in print, not millions. There's no good reason for them to volunteer to bring more of that competition against their own new books. Authors are far more concerned about keeping their backlist in print, especially for a series than publishers ever are, especially if any of the backlist was originally published elsewhere.
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In digital, though, there's literally so much book competition that throwing any more books into the market will just be white noise for all but the customer that is looking for that ONE BOOK they've been trying to hunt down. If that backlist has a pretty decent profit margin on it, and if it doesn't cost much to digitize, why not throw it into the pile for the occasional sale? Of course if digitization is actually fairly pricey, then it's not really worth the risk.
But I'm not convinced that internal competition is such a problem when publishers have to fend off literally every form of media created by human kind since the dawn of time to get somebody to buy a book. The competition isn't just in the thousands anymore, not in our networked easy-to-access world.