[crich70]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

Well, if it was true that they were shooting themselves in the foot, that wouldn't be the only thing they were doing. It would also mean they were leaving more consumer money on the table to be spent on products of small and self publishers. Are you against that?

Publishers pay people to pour over statistics to see what would be optimum prices. It slightly mystifies me why people here would think they know better.


Why do you want them to make money? I just want them to do well enough to stay in the business of improving manuscripts I will want to read.

But for your benefit:

Citing continued benefits from the integration of Penguin and Random House, Pearson said its 47% stake in the world’s largest trade publisher earned 129 million pounds ($136 million) in operating profits for the company in 2016. The sum marks a 43% increase over 2015.

As I said, I don't see this as positive or negative. Losing lots of money year after year -- as in the newspaper industry -- now that is negative, since it results in less good reading material, especially regarding current affairs.

The thing is though that statistics can be worked to say what you want them to say. For example I imagine if income was down for a publisher they could point to ebooks as the reason, but it could just as easily be that the economy is down (so people buy less books) or that the publisher misjudged the market and published books that the public wasn't as interested in. Or even that the cover design of (author x's) new novel didn't go over as well with the reading public. It could even be that big name author x was ill and so got their new book to the publisher late and that is why income is down. Statistics can guide but they can also mislead as well.