[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

I was talking specifically about maintaining accounts on the private trackers, and you cannot track volumes on usenet. And, um, Grokster? Sorry, you're quite litterally years behind the status-quo if you think that's still even remotely relevant today - it entirely died four years ago, and was surpassed well before then.

True, Groxster was a poor example. I was thinking of P2P networks that aren't torrent based, using things like eMule.

You can know that it's instead of a legal copy when no legal copy exists.

Assuming you know no legal copy exists. Discovering that can take time and effort.

And I wasn't just thinking of the "no legal copy". I was thinking of the cases where there is a legal ebook copy for sale, which someone has stripped of DRM and made available through file sharing. Or, for that matter, the cases where there is a legal ebook copy, but also a pirated edition based on a scan of the paper book.

As mentioned, the key question is "What is the impact on sales of people who download a read a pirated electronic copy instead of buying a legal one?" Assuming every illegal download equates to a lost sale is open to large questions.

There are a small number of horders, but they're basically insignificant except insofar as they seed everything.

Agreed.

It's really not that hard!

Not that hard is relative. For an individual title, it's one thing. For a full publisher's line, collecting the data might be a chore.

I don't believe so from the statements Baen have made over the years. But if they replace hardback sales at 1:1, so what? The money involved is higher for Baen and the author for eARC's than a hardback (and it's months earlier)! I for one tend to wait and pick up the final ebook later rather than *any* paper version.

Is it really? I haven't spoken to any of the Baen folks in a bit, but I believe they make rather more from a hardcover sale than an ebook sale.

Indeed, the Baen Free Library was started entirely to promote the dead tree editions, and Baen credited the Free Library with driving their metamorphosis from a struggling mass market publisher to a thriving hardcover house with a 70% sell through rate. In an email some time back, Baen stated he did not see pure electronic publishing as a source of profit at the time.

Fortunately, he's been proven incorrect in that assumption: Baen makes more money from the Webscriptions program than they do from all foriegn sales.

But I don't think Baen would be happy if hardcover sales dropped to 0 and were replaced by ebook sales.

And why, precisely, wouldn't their model work for any fiction publisher? Oh, some academic press publishers and so on might find it dosn't work, but they'd be better looking at offering a service rather than a fixed book in the first place.

I'm not talking about just fiction publishers. I am talking about all publishers.

Baen is to some extent a special case. They are an independent publisher who is manufactured, marketed, and distributed by Simon and Schuster, but they are not an S&S subsidiary. They have far more freedom to make their own policies and innovate in their sales and marketing methods.

Tor is a full subsidiary of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck in Germany. Tor is part of Macmillan in the US, and Macmillan is un umbrella including Farrar Straus and Giroux, Henry Holt & Company, W.H. Freeman and Worth Publishers, Palgrave Macmillan, Bedford/St. Martin’s, Picador, Roaring Brook Press, St. Martin’s Press, Tor Books, and Bedford Freeman & Worth Publishing Group.

But Tor was an independent who sold themselves to Holtzbrink when CEO Tom Doherty foresaw increasingly difficult times in publishing, and decided being part of a bigger, better heeled organization was a wise idea. Tor seems to have a fair degree of autonomy, and is being used by Holtzbrink as a test bed for new ideas and innovations.

Most other fiction publishers are imprints of larger companies whose lines include non-fiction, and who lack that freedom.

This is not one-size-fits-all. Assuming Baen's model will work for all publishers, or even all fiction publishers, is extremely optimistic.
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Dennis