Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
The one thing that pre-Cote-ruling/pre-original-agency-pricing data would have shown us, is whether or not select $9.99 ebook prices were hurting hardback sales either. It would have been nice to be able to show that publishers were wrong right across the board when it came to their " protecting our hardback market" rationale. 
It's not at all surprising to me that ebooks priced similarly to hardbacks does not affect hardback sales (sort of a no-brainer) ... nor that windowing didn't sell more hardbacks (we all suspected as much). Always nice to have some hard data that shows much of the fear-induced, ebook-diddling, hardcover-protecting hooey was in fact hooey, though. |
Interestingly, the authors were hired by the publishing house to look at the data and find out. While I'm sure there are some who are unwilling to give the publishing house credit, I think that actually looking at the data is always a good thing.
One thing that I liked about the book is that it give a very detailed explanation of the publishers' economic model, and why it works for books, but doesn't work for some other things. It's one of the best explanations that I've read.
I have a certain amount of sympathy for the publishers with regards to ebooks simply because early in the ebook process, I read a lot of angst about ebooks from various authors, including some one wouldn't think. I read one fairly popular SF author who called his backlist his 401K. To a great extent, that's how many authors say it. Their backlist books got released every 6 or 7 years, which generated a fairly steady stream of revenue. So I can see why they were worried about it. It's pretty easy to worry about things when there is no data to give guidance.
Now we have a fair amount of data. Baen had been doing ebooks since 1998, Amazon since 2007. As far as I can tell, that one author seems to be pretty happy with his ebook sales.