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Originally Posted by DuckieTigger
You make your case there (bold mine). Now please do explain how the new windowing to allow ONE perpetual ebook per library is not exactly the same as banning ebooks from libraries at release. The only nice thing is allowing a reduced price perpetual ebook that never expires with time or number of loans. Libraries could go wide instead of deep, reducing demand of the publishers cash cows by advertising a very wide selection of older titles.
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I'm not sure what you mean. I would say that the publishers discovered that windowing eBooks in the bookstores wasn't effective and windowing eBooks in libraries was effective. Bookstores and libraries are fairly different demographics. I also suspect that the underlying assumptions are somewhat different.
For bookstores, the assumptions are 1) eBooks are significantly cheaper than hard back books (true for some books, when Amazon was using best sellers as loss leaders to build the market for eBooks) and 2) there is a degree of piracy going on with eBooks. Amazon stopped doing the loss leader thing and piracy doesn't seem to be a big problem, so neither assumption held true. Basically, releasing eBooks at the same time as the hard back did not hurt the sales figures.
For libraries, the assumption is that people borrow the eBook for free rather than buy the book, and if they have to wait to borrow the book, a significant portion will buy it instead. McMillian seems to think that their data supports this assumption. I guess we will see as McMillian expands the Tor experiment.