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Originally Posted by zerospinboson
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.
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Nope. They have exclusive rights because being the sole source of something is valuable. You can find plenty of examples of that in all sorts of industries.
It's why we have copyrights. As an author of copyrighted material, you control the rights, and are the sole source of that material while the copyrights are in force. Someone who wants to publish your material must negotiate a license from you to do so. The intent of copyright in the first place was to encourage production by granting the creators exclusive rights to their creations.
When something is no longer exclusive to a vendor, it becomes a commodity, with enormous pressure on price and margins, and most vendors of whateevr it is are likely to stop offering it, as they can't make money doing so.
Let's say I'm an author, with a manuscript several publishers are interested in. Which is a better deal for me? Exclusive rights for one publisher in a particular area, or rights offered to several publishers in the same area? My guess is, a deal with a single publisher. If more than one publisher gets rights to publish, and they
know they are one of a group, what incentive does any single one have to actively promote and sell the book? If there efforts may mean "generate more sales for a competitor", not much.
It's also far more complicated for me and/or my agent to negotiate rights in such a scenario.
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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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Yes, continuing and incremental costs are lower for electronic books, You do still have warehousing and distribution costs, in terms of server maintenance and bandwidth bills, but they are an order of magnitude lower per book.
However, you still have substantial costs to acquire and develop the titles in the first palce, whether of not you actually sell paper copies of them, and those costs will impose limits on how low a price you can charge.
It would be nice if we could just ignore the buyer's location when offering ebooks. Unfortunately, in many instances, we
can't.
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Dennis