Thread: Library Windowing - Penguin Australia
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Old 05-26-2020, 07:03 AM   #2
pwalker8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl View Post
On 1 March 2020 Viking published the paper book version of Australian Historian Geoffrey Blainey's "Captain Cook's Epic Voyage". On 31 March 2020 Penguin EBooks published the Kindle e-book edition of the same work. The Audible edition was also released on 31 March 2020. It appears that Paper and Audiobook versions are available in Australian libraries, but not the e-book version. So it appears that the publishers strategy in this case has been to release the paper version initially, with Audiobook and E-Book versions available for purchase about a month later. Whilst paper and Audiobook versions are now available in libraries, the e-book edition is not, almost 2 months later.

Here is the link on Amazon Australia (https://www.amazon.com.au/Captain-Co...=UTF8&qid=&sr=)

The Audiobook is available for sale on Amazon US, though other versions are not, except very expensive Paperbacks and an Audio CD through third parties.

I find this interesting for a couple of reasons. MacMillan was in the spotlight for its experimentation with libraries and suffered substantial adverse publicity before its back-down for which it blamed the Coronavirus. But it appears PRH is also playing games with libraries on at least some books. Secondly, it is interesting to see the Audiobook edition available in libraries whilst the e-book edition is not. This is disappointing but hardly surprising. I wonder to what extent other publishers are windowing their e-book releases, and whether PRH is also adopting this approach in the US.
So far, in the US, I haven't seen a situation where a new book was available on Amazon in paper and audiobook, but not in ebook. All the examples I can think of are older books.

Looking at that book in the US Amazon store, it appears that it's from the Australian Penguin Random House, i.e. it's an import. That's why the paperback is so expensive. It's pretty common for books to take awhile to be available in the US. It took about a year for Stephen Fry's Mythos and Heroes to become available in the US after they appeared in the UK Amazon.
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