Quote:
Originally Posted by ficbot
One of the reasons publishers seem to fear ebooks so much is the threat that ebook sales will 'cannibalize' print sales. I am curious whether readers here find this is true for them. If you had not bought the ebook, would you have bought the print book instead?
For me, I would not have. I do not have the space to store physical copies of every book I might want to read. So, instead of 'no ebook equals print sale' it's 'no ebook equals no sale and I get it from the library.' There is no way the publishers could 'convince' me to buy a print copy by withholding the sale of an ebook. All they will do is lose money.
What does everyone else think---does an ebook sale, for you, represent a lost print sale?
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To specify this claim of theirs a bit further: They're afraid it will cannibalize high-yield HC sales. I doubt they care one fig about pback sales (which generate horrible overhead costs what with all the no-sale book destruction)
Ideally, I would see a world where all pbacks were replaced by ebooks, with people only sometimes buying HCs (when they felt the book merited it).
That said, for those people who
treasure Dan Brown/Harry Potter, and want to buy it asap, they
might indeed buy fewer HCs if they all owned an ebookreader, but this could easily be solved by, say, selling the ebooks at HC price until pb introduction (or whatever).
Anyway, the only paper books
I buy are HCs (with the exception of some OUP titles and textbooks).