Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
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. |
I think ebooks bring a totally different model - primarily because a book never needs to go 'out of print' in the first place. Authors can have their entire back catalog available and, even better, available in the same place readers buy their other books. Back in the day if you found an author that you liked you had to hope that your local Borders (or whatever) carried their other books. Usually they had parts of series and always the wrong ones.
With ebooks you can go back to Amazon and find all their other work.
Of course there will no longer be beat up copies to replace....but there also isn't a competing used book market. I'm curious what the long term effect on authors' "401k" will be.