Quote:
Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
That's always said, but the economics are completely unconvincing, especially because of the rate at which digital sales have grown, and the revenue going direct to artists from various sources has risen. Again, the best customers are also among the biggest downloaders. And I don't mean "they go to concerts", I mean "they buy tracks and albums".
There are also alternate revenue sources which books can tap. Look at Baen's eARC's. They have a very low overhead (they're the unproofed galleys!), costing basically the fairly minimal cost to push out onto their platform and they're typically over twice the price of the final ebook...which they don't even include!
Let's not even go into how some very potentially embarrassing universe continuity errors have been caught online in the snippet/eARC stage (character ages in Crown of Slaves comes to mind!)
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Don't get me wrong, I am all for Baen's business model; meaning no DRM (pretty much useless, anyway). I just think authors deserve to be paid for their work rather than survive on government handouts. For those who don't want to pay for their books -- there are so many great legal freebies out there to keep you busy for a life time.
And yes, that music downloads are thriving makes me optimistic that the "all works in digital forms should be free" crowd is a small minority, albeit a significant and vocal one.