Quote:
Originally Posted by DuckieTigger
Treat pbooks and ebooks equally when it comes to libraries.
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If publishers did that, the total cost of ownership, or of a lend, for the library, of an eBook would be a fraction of the pbook price. So public libraries would be incentivized to buy/lease so many eBooks that there would be no or little wait. This would cannibalize retail big five sales while, eventually, undermining taxpayer support for physical libraries.
Few seem to recognize what a great job publishers of narrative nonfiction books have done in navigating the digital transition while magazines and newspapers, employing the same sorts of authors, have been devastated. Fiction readers may not care -- because no matter have good or bad the economics, their kind of books will still be written and distributed. Not so much with the kind I read. Most of them are based on book proposals that won't result in anything good to read unless they are funded.
I am now finishing up
Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II. Author Michael Zuckoff explains that he spent his advance on the "modern quest" making up about half the book. No advance, no modern adventure, no book.
Contrast with the university press model. Advances are only a couple thousand. Or less. This is not enough to allow the author to produce a better manuscript. University press editing for readability, for most titles I see, is ineffective in comparison with the big five standard. And as for public libraries, university presses, with exceptions, refuse to lease them eBooks at
any price. In these ways the university presses are almost as bad as Amazon's publishing ventures. Why the silence regarding them?