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Originally Posted by ZodWallop
No doubt you are correct. The hostility you see to the big publishers here stems from their actions to stymie the e-book market when it was just beginning to flourish.
You would think they would have watched what happened with the record companies and learned a lesson from it. They learned alright. But their reaction was way off, forcing popular bookselling sites to close and making Amazon even more powerful (the exact opposite of what they were trying to do),
I still think we need the big publishers and it does feel like less of a crapshoot buying a book from a new author published by them than one that is self published. They serve a purpose.
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Part of the reason that I post about Jerry Pournelle is that I'm pretty sure the issue with ebooks was with the authors rather than the publishers. Remember the last three Wheel of Time books? They were held back for ebooks not because the publisher wanted to, but rather because Jordan's widow wanted to make sure they made the NYT best seller list and she was worried that ebook sales would hurt that goal.
A lot of authors were (and many still are) worried about piracy and how that would effect sales long term. For the most part, publishers will go along with the author's wishes, assuming the author expresses those wishes.
Once again, recheck your timeline. Many of those popular ebook sites had either already closed or had been bought out before agency pricing became a thing. Those sites were harmed a lot more by Amazon's loss leaders than they were by the publishers.