Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
Why is EVERYTHING that a Publisher has rights to and has the files, not on POD?
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Because they say so.
It's their prerogative as gatekeepers.
Just because they *can* keep everything they control in print, doesn't mean they *want* to. Their primary revenue streams still come from new releases. POD lets them supplement that with long tail sales of past successful books but not every book is a success in their view. And they are supposed to keep track of every book's sales to pay out the royalties. That has a cost. When a company like the randy Penguin puts out 17,000 different titles in a year (20,000+ when the merger is rubberstamped) the fate of any single book is of little concern beyond launch window sales and the added valuation it adds.
Not every kind of book actually sells enough past their launch to be worth tracking. It tends to vary by genre first and then by author and title. SF is notorious for the enduring sales of the deep backlist, books from the 40's and 50's routinely outsell some new releases. Other genres don't, beyond a handful of exemplars.
Stephen King books, yeah; those get POD'ed.
Joe Whosethat? No necessarily.
Many don't even get ebook editions.
But when it comes to putting a monetary value to a publisher's assets, even books that aren't exploited count. In bulk, if nothing else.
That is why copyrights have been extended repeatedly.
Plus, not every publisher everywhere has adopted the newer techs.
There's still publishers in english language markets (Australia, NZ, and yes, Ireland) who bemoan the rise of ebooks and the global english market because it lets their readers get books from the US, UK, and Canada. And it never crosses their minds that global english lets *them* sell globally.
(Try this: before Amazon introduced a Japanese version of Kindle, one of the top selling ebooks was a very basic user guide that got something like 90% of its sales from Japan where it went viral among people importing Kindles to have access to original english editions of books, particularly business non-fiction.)
It takes all kinds and not everybody everwhere behaves as expected.