Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Need to change it? Why do they need to? The big publishers are commercially successful. Why change a successful business model?
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Because books are meant to be free?
What's interesting is that the business model for authors and publishers has changed quite a bit over my life time for various reasons. When I first started reading, many authors got much of their money from magazine sales and book sales were kind of secondary. At one time, libraries were one of the biggest buyers of non best seller books. Neither is really the case anymore.
One of the more interesting changes we are seeing right now is the rise of the audio books. You also have the rise of the indie movement which has a totally different business model than the traditional publishers.
Jerry Pournelle, back when Baen Books was just starting their ebooks and monthly bundles, talked a bit about his current business model in various columns. He was slowing down a bit by that time, but talked about how he looked at his back list as his 401K, i.e. his more popular books were republished on a regular basis and brought in an expected amount of money as new fans discovered his books and old fans replaced tattered or lost copies. With ebooks, authors were very concerned about that business model changing.
It would be very interesting to see how much that old business model has changed for authors and what their ongoing money streams are with regards to paper sales, ebook sales and audio sales. Scalzi broke it out for his first year sales for Redshirts and Lockout, but I don't think he's repeated that. I had expected that authors would have a much longer tail in sales (i.e. monthly sales of older books) with ongoing sales a Amazon, plus ebooks and audiobooks. It would be very interesting to see if that expectation was accurate.