Quote:
Originally Posted by auspex
LOL. It's hard to understand how most book publishers haven't learned any lessons from the experience of the music industry's mishandling of new media at least a decade ago.
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You know, this is not true *at all*. It couldn't be *more false*.
Publishers moved much more quickly into e-book publishing than music publishers did, they quickly made books available in e-book formats, they embraced e-readers, and they all consider e-reading to be an important part of their strategy.
The mistakes that music publishers made was waiting until it was too late to embrace digital music, to produce incompatible formats (Sony ATRAC), and to try and uphold the album-sale model.
Having said that, though, the markets really aren't comparable. The music industry found itself in a situation where people could easily and cheaply rip and distribute music to millions of people. All it took was for one person to buy a CD and use a free program to rip the CD to mp3 format. This was and is the biggest problem that the music publishers faced.
Book publishers don't face any threat like this - once an e-book has been made, yes, it's trivial to distribute it. But it's not trivial to make an e-book in the first place (at least not compared to the two minutes of unattended time it takes to rip a CD).
Book publishers are dedicated to the idea of making all books available to whoever wants to buy them, in whatever format they want, to read on whatever device they want. Not doing this is the big mistake that music publishers made. It's not a mistake that book publishers are making.
Now it may be a mistake for book publishers to insist on certain prices, or to argue over who sets the price. But that's *not at all* the mistake that music publishers made.