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Originally Posted by fjtorres
Agreed.
Ebooks are a major disruption in distribution efficiency.
In that respect, the move from pulps to paperback was a step backwards because pulps were distributed via newspaper and magazine channels that were much faster than book channels. That remains true today. And it is an under-appreciated advantage of digital: the time to bring a title to market is much shorter. A tradpub book typically takes about two years to reach the market after acceptance whereas small digital publishers can bring the title to market within weeks or even days. (Pulps worked on a 60-90 day cycle much like comics do today.)
Another under-appreciated advantage (for readers and authors, anyway) is the freedom from the page count restrictions of pbooks. Short stories can come to market individually, long narratives don't need to be restructured and either padded or broken up into series to reach market. A 30k word novella and a 200k word mega novel are both equally easy to distribute. Over time I think this will be defining even in markets that today are hostile to digital.
Ebooks are impacting the entire supply chain in different ways for each segment. And it is revitalizing/boosting a lot of niches ranging from short fiction to entire genres and subgenres some of which have minimal market access via print.
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Plus there is the weight issue. A 200k paper book might weigh let's say 8 ounces (half a pound) or more, while a short story (being in a magazine) would weigh a lot less, but when they are both in eformat they weigh the same. They may take up different amounts of space on the hard drive of the reader(i.e kb or MB) but their weight is the same (the weight of the ereader device). Some of those issues might also factor in to why ereadrers aren't as popular in Japan as here in the U.S. Japan is a highly traditional society from what I understand and they probably resist change in some ways more than we do here in the west. So going from paper to ebooks might not appeal as much to them as well