Quote:
Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic
Wow. This interview is not for the faint of heart. Anybody care to bite at this?
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Yes.
I'm afraid that this is exactly how the major publishers perceive the ebook market.
Baen are an anomaly: eight people in the company, a [founding -- RIP] CEO with a whim of iron, and a technically ept geek to run the ebook subsidiary. More importantly, Baen were an independent -- 33% owned by Tor, but otherwise privately owned by Jim plus friends and family. That's why they've persistently run rings around the other US SF publishers. Tor is part of Macmillan, Ace are part of Penguin, and in
those corporations policy is set at a global, multi-publisher level, by people who don't have a clue about the technology.
(I have heard one editor lamenting how, when trying to hook up with an ebook publisher, his house's lawyers had sent them draft legal contract boilerplate that included terms governing the return of stripped covers for credit -- with the word "e-book" slipped in to replace "paperback".)