Quote:
Originally Posted by Lynx-lynx
Fbone but that's what doesn't make sense, because our Aus publishers know via their own research that discretionary spending on books has never been 'high' on the list for Australians.
And yet they seem to want to charge more and have less customers, rather than charge a lesser price and have more customers.
They've clung to some sort of logic that really hasn't produced the best financial results for them or for our Aus authors.  |
Australian publishers (by which I mean Australian subsidiaries of the large publishing houses, seem to simply long for the good old days. These are the days when there were no ebooks and no Amazon. The US Publishers and the UK Publishers simply divided the world markets up between them. Australia, of course, fell under the UK sphere. Parallel Importing rules allowed local readers to be treated with absolute contempt, and this is the way they were treated.
I can see nothing that is happening which is inconsistent with the view that the big Publishers, both in Australia and Worldwide, want to try and preserve a status quo rendered obsolete by technology. Like most industries that have found themselves in such a position, and there are many, the participants have lobbied endlessly and sought legislation to protect their failing business models. Geographic restrictions are an attempt to destroy the one world market created by the Internet and EBooks, by artificially recreating the plethora of world markets that used to exist. The major problems for the Publishers is that there is little justification for doing this other than their own vested interests, and that the technology used is easily circumvented. Further, the only way that this can be made to work is by a combination of geo-blocking technology and draconian legislation ruthlessly enforced. And for what gain?
And of course, as you say, in the case of books the spending is discretionary! How on earth do they believe that they can succeed? Better for them to face facts and come up with a profitable business model that works in the new market.