Quote:
Originally Posted by MGlitch
So publishers sell to the library. Library lends out book. The people borrow said book. Those people do not buy the book. The library doesn’t give the publishers anything regardless of how much the book is borrowed for a single license they may or may not purchase additional licenses that’s not actually material to the topic as it just exponentiates the issue.
The publisher still views the people who borrowed the book as lost sales since they could have sold to them as well as the library. And again it doesn’t matter if the person was never going to buy the book only borrow it from the library it’s still something that the publishers view as a lost sale.
And again the lost sales from selling to the library are factored in. But they exist.
|
An interesting claim. I somehow doubt that any publisher is far enough removed from reality to believe that if the library did not have the book to loan, every person who would have borrowed the book would have gone out and purchased their very own personal copy.
I just checked the 27 ebooks added to my local library in the last 7 days. 16 of them had wait times over 6 months. 1 of them had a 2 week wait time, 2 had a 6 week wait time with the remainder pretty much evenly scattered over the 8 to 20 week wait times.
As for lost sales and lost profits, given the pricing of ebooks for library loans, the profit margin on a single library sale is much higher than the profit margin on a single retail ebook purchase. This would have to be balanced against the potential profit of the possible sales lost due to the 26 to 52 loans allowed by publishers on that "sale" to the library.
As an example, one ebook recently purchased by my local library cost them $49.30 Cdn for 26 loans or 1 year (whichever comes first). I can purchase the book from Kobo for $8.99 Cdn -- a mere $40.31 less than the library paid. A rather different situation from pbooks where the library can buy the book for it's SRP or less from any retailer, no loan limits, no drop dead dates.