Quote:
Originally Posted by MGlitch
Nor do I claim they do. A lost sale is not always something you -can- get back. I have in fact spelled out previously that this would fall into the accounted for losses. But any business worth a damn is still going to factor in losses they can not prevent.
Which:
1) assumes no one on those lists returns them early
2) provides no information on the number of licenses the library has for those books
3) provides no information about the buying intentions of anyone on those lists
4) does not account for people who may be part of multiple library systems one of which you're looking at
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Hmmm...
1. According to library records, very few ebook loans are returned early. In point, their computer system will flag people who borrow books and return them early on a consistent basis. Very few people can churn through 5 to 10 books per week on a consistent basis. I was caught by this at one time and ended up chatting with the library IT about the effect of a 1K WPM reading speed on book consumption.
2. You want the number of copies? They are displayed along with the projected hold wait period. On these books, the number was from 1 to 13 -- the 13 copy had an 18 week wait time.
3. Nor was it intended to. You seem to be saying the publishers regard any library loan as a "lost sale". To me, those wait times suggest that those people are not planning on buying the book or they would not have bothered to place the hold. After all, the wait time is displayed when you go to place the hold.
4. In this area, some libraries have an ebook collection outside of the BC Libraries Cooperative Library2Go but the majority are using the same collection. I checked the Vancouver Public Library which does have their own collection in addition to accessing the BCLC and basically, their wait times on the new in the last 7 days books that are common to the BCLC are identical (these are likely to be the more popular books and their wait times on their own collection vary from 2 weeks to at least 6 months (I suspect 12 holds or more all get the at least 6 months message). I tend to the belief that very few people are willing to pay for access to libraries such as the Orange County or Philadelphia Free libraries.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MGlitch
Yes, a library will pay more for a given books license. You'll note I did not claim the publishers weren't making good money off the library. My only claim has been that they count the borrowed books as lost sales. Of course with your own example the publisher only needs to entice 5 people in that 90 day period to not wait for the library to have the book before the those sales overtake the library sale.
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You might want to read my words more closely. The library paid $40.31 more for a single copy with a limited lifetime. That is the amount over costs that would have to be made on the sales to those 5 customers allowing for whatever additional costs are associated with Overdrive or other service provider reducing that number. Are we to believe the total costs of producing and selling an ebook sold at $8.99 Cdn is $0.93 Cdn? Not to mention that when the library copy expires, the library will have to choose whether to repurchase the ebook at the same inflated price or remove it from their collection so yet another chance for profit.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MGlitch
As I've said before, a publisher isn't going to just sit back and say "well we sold to the library for a nice profit, lets just leave the possible extra money on the table'. That's not how businesses operate, they want to maximize their profit.
So Macmillan limits libraries to 1 license for the first 90 days, in that 90 days it's fully possible greater than 5 people will buy the book. The probability only goes up using the figures you provided above with longer and longer wait times. And as I demonstrated in an earlier post those 5 sales start to mean a lot of profit as you crunch the numbers.
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90 days with an average 2 week loan is 6.5 people borrowing the book. And I still wonder where you get the 5 sales from since simple math makes it fairly obvious that the profit margin on a sale to a library is a bleep of a lot higher than on retail sales even allowing for Overdrive et alia's desire to make money as well. How many libraries will buy a copy of the ebook? Say 120,000 public libraries between the USA and Canada so, at a WEG, 4000 ebook purchases (allowing for many libraries that do not purchase their own ebooks but are part of a larger group). So using your logic, that would indicate the publishers are hoping for 20,000 extra sales over those 14 weeks. That would put the book just on ebook sales almost halfway to a NYT bestseller.
I probably buy a lot more ebooks than most people, even the members of Mobileread. I might purchase an ebook at full price if I had to wait 3 months but my past behaviour says that I would wait out the hold period. OTOH, I tend to be quite active in recommending books so the automatic hold means that I will be near the front of the queue for books I am interested in.