Perhaps you should remind them of Baen's success with reasonably-priced DRM-free ebooks. Ebooks appear to be bringing in something between 10% and 20% of their total gross sales -- and a moderately higher percentage of their profits -- even as they pay their authors better royalties for electronic sales than for paper. All this while they've doubled the size of the company, and seen their total sales increase through a period when all the rest of publishing is shrinking!
That experience really ought to open some eyes at any publishing house! Sadly, the normal response is more along the lines of "sure, it works for them. But we're different, because [we have best-selling authors/they're just a 'genre' publisher/or whatever]". I think other publishers would do better to say "we should try it too!" -- but I'm sure that those publishing industry insiders know better. After all, they're doing so much better than Baen... right?
More to the point -- there is absolutely no excuse for eBook costing more than the least-expensive new dead-tree edition of the same book. This should never happen!
Xenophon
Last edited by Xenophon; 05-01-2009 at 08:10 PM.
Reason: Added comparison between Dead-tree and eBook prices.
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