Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I must respectfully disagree with you. Almost all newly-published books are released as ebooks, and generally considerably below the price of the paper book. It costs money to release backlist titles as ebooks, since in almost all cases the book is not available in electronic form, but most of the major publishers are doing a pretty decent job of gradually releasing their backlist.
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Well I don't discount the possibility that they may be improving though you do sometimes have to wonder when the ebook costs more than the paper. And I've lost count of how many times I've seen threads here about how this or that book isn't available (for whatever reason) as an ebook. So I might have a skewed perspective on things or it might be that the books that a given person wants are the exception to the rule. Certainly a new author can't charge as much (or rather the publisher can't) for a given book as well. I mean if Stephen King weren't an established author I doubt his publishers would price his books at their current prices (whatever they are) just as an example. I haven't bought many of his of late so I don't know what the actual price of one of his books is. I'd wager though that for every backlist book/author that is released as an ebook there are 5-10 that haven't been. We often don't know the majority of authors who wrote during a given decade because their books often didn't sell many copies for whatever reason in paper. The ones we do know such as Wells, Twain, Stevenson etc. on up to the present are the exceptions to the rule I think.