Quote:
Originally Posted by cassidym
And the article further bstates "Recent statistics have shown that consumers who purchase an e-reader buy more books than those who stick with traditional bound volumes. Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers." and goes on to say that piracy may be a 'necessary evil'
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I wonder how much that translates into more actual book sales. Of course a Kindle owner is likely to buy a lot more books
at Amazon than they did before they bought the Kindle. That doesn't mean that a lot more money is going
to the publishers. It may just be coming in from a different source. Most people who own Kindles probably buy most if not all their books from Amazon now. Before they bought the Kindle, they likely had more diverse sources. I would say that there's probably some increase in the total number of sales. Reader owners may buy more than borrow now. Most libraries don't have large ebook selections if they have them at all. I suppose people may also go through books a bit faster with a reader, too, since they can get a new one immediately when they finish the last one.
However, I can see the publishers' concern moving to the future. The ebook market is still fairly small. As ebook sellers get more of the total book market, they may pressure the publishers to drop prices on the ebooks. Print still has fairly high fixed costs and they won't be able to abandon it for quite some time, so they might see a real revenue drop even if ebook sales remain strong and grow. Then there's the fact that the level of piracy may grow proportionally much higher as ebooks get more popular. As it is now, most pirate copies are scanned paper books. A lot of that has to do with the culture of the current pirate community. It values the effort. That may go away as ebooks get more popular. There may not be a community any more, just a bunch of folks uploading and downloading. If I were of a mind to do it, I could have a book stripped, converted and up on a site in less than a minute. It would be a higher quality copy than most of the scanned and OCRed stuff you can currently find. For now, the publishers can compete on quality but that may not be so for long. The only way they're going to avoid losing substantial revenue to piracy is to do what they're already digging in their heals against: lower prices and dump the inconvenient DRM. If you want to compete with free, it's got to be cheap and easy to buy books. Lots of people stopped downloading music and started buying it when iTunes gave them 99 cent songs in an easy-to-use store. It doesn't stop piracy altogether (nothing will) but some money is better than no money.