Thread: Publishers continue to live in the past
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Old 10-10-2009, 07:28 PM   #58
zerospinboson
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney View Post
How would you expect non-exclusive rights to work?
Why do exclusive rights exist now? It's because of the problem of print runs, correct? So that publishers won't all print the same books, and then find out they won't be able to sell all their stock because the market has been flooded.
How does this apply to ebooks, though? Yes, setting up an ebook store/'warehouse' requires an initial investment. If the estimate made in another thread is correct and representative, this cost Hachette $16m. After that, however, there are nearly no storage costs, marginal encoding costs (DRM), etc. It hardly makes any difference whether you carry 10000 or 1000000 titles (sure, redundancy, etc.. but that's a separate issue. The additional cost per-book is near-negligible.). So why would they still need exclusive ebook rights? I can see they wouldn't want to be outcompeted on price by another publisher, but that argument takes the monopoly as its starting point and goes from there.
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