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Originally Posted by zacheryjensen
Now I've got nothing against Baen and what they stand for and sell. I'm all for the "little guy" and despise DRM. But this issue is blind to the niche markets, it's about the popular major markets, and Baen simply has no presence there at all.
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The popular major markets are running into many of the same problems that the RIAA faces: digital distribution has changed the way they can effectively do business. The model that worked very well 15 years ago is no longer as useful, and its efficacy shrinks every day as more people get online and bandwidth and storage space get cheaper.
It's likely that there is an effective way to manage a publishing house that focuses on a handful of blockbuster sellers, and churns out hundreds of books by other authors whose careers they're not nearly as interested in promoting. However, that won't be by limiting public access to the big-name authors' works in order to get profit from the format they'd like to be their big seller.
It'll be a while before the mainstream public is comfortable with ebooks, and longer still until those are the majority. But it will happen... and the longer big publishers delay in accepting that, the more their competition will take over their market share.
20 years from now, I expect plenty of people to read books on paper. After all, radio didn't die when TV came out, nor even when it got really, really popular. But TV did kill the radio serial story, and we may see pop fiction novels almost vanish from print.