MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Publishers: look at the used book market when considering eBooks

Liviu_5 · 11-02-2006, 02:18 PM

My take is that the analogy with used books is flawed because for whatever reasons (contingent or intrinsic) people generally do not want to pay for e-content amounts comparable to physically tied content. Maybe it's all that "free" e-content available (there are of course indirect costs like internet access, cost of pc's and other devices, ads) that we got used to, maybe is just that we value the physical object more, the book and its cover, the dvd/cd and its jacket...

So the revenue stream is not there as opposed to print and the publishers quite rationally do not want to jeopardize that with competition from e-books. Most likely it will take an outside factor (maybe cheap fast scanners) like it took for music (mp3's) and movies (broadband) to force publishers to do ebooks in a reasonable way.

Liviu

11-02-2006, 02:18 PM	#2
Liviu_5 Books and more books Posts: 917 Karma: 69499 Join Date: Mar 2006 Location: White Plains, NY, USA Device: Nook Color, Itouch, Nokia770, Sony 650, Sony 700(dead), Ebk(given)	My take is that the analogy with used books is flawed because for whatever reasons (contingent or intrinsic) people generally do not want to pay for e-content amounts comparable to physically tied content. Maybe it's all that "free" e-content available (there are of course indirect costs like internet access, cost of pc's and other devices, ads) that we got used to, maybe is just that we value the physical object more, the book and its cover, the dvd/cd and its jacket... So the revenue stream is not there as opposed to print and the publishers quite rationally do not want to jeopardize that with competition from e-books. Most likely it will take an outside factor (maybe cheap fast scanners) like it took for music (mp3's) and movies (broadband) to force publishers to do ebooks in a reasonable way. Liviu