Quote:
Originally Posted by DuckieTigger
No, you are confusing intent to read with willingness to buy your own copy at full retail price. Jon is very interested in reading a certain book, therefore he will cave in and eventually buy his own copy anyway. In Jon's case I doubt it is true, and he even said so. The assumption that makes you think that is possibly believing in special snow flakes?
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No, you're looking at it from a consumer point of view, not from a business point of view.
From a business point of view that's a lost sale. There are things they could do, in theory, to get the sale but it becomes a question of if it's still profitable to do those things. Regardless of that decision though it's still a lost sale, it's either calculated as an acceptable loss to revenue or an unexpected loss in revenue.
The acceptable loss is obvious, when the publisher would be losing too much to make the sale. The exact amount a book should sell for isn't a debate we should bother with since this forum is already plagued by those from time to time, but the actual specific figure isn't needed here. We just need to know that the sale price X has to be higher than the loss in profits price Y.
The unexpected loss is any loss they do not account for in their projections. Which can be made up of numerous factors, we really do not need to get into the details on. Library borrows are one, but certainly not the only one.
And yes this is a simplification of the whole ordeal, if you recall I wanted to try and avoid getting into the nitty gritty of this because it's largely irrelevant. The point is the publisher sees the libraries lending out multiple licenses of new books within 90s days as a potential loss in revenue, which is caused by loss of sales. They are counting on the people who can be swayed to buy, but don't for a second assume they have not factored in the people who refuse to buy, as lost sales. Those become acceptable because they'd either need to reduce the price of the book to Y or provide some other incentive which would effectively reduce X to Y for the particular book.