Quote:
Originally Posted by Daithi
In short, as far as digital books are concerned, you don't need publishers.
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Actually what is not neccesary for digital books are the physical book distributors, in a completely eBook world they will provide very little, if any, value.
Technically you don't need a publisher now for a pBook either, but I think (I hope) that we can all agree that the publishers add a certain amount of value and that that value is independent of the medium by which that the book is distributed. Over time what has to happen is that an agreement has to reached between all parties over what constitutes a fair price for the product. Some people are assuming that just because a book is in an electronic format it should be available for an incredibly low price. The fair way to do this would be to calculate the cost of physically printing, distributing, storing, returning, destroying (the over prints and mistakes) the physical books and subtract that from the ebook price. I'm sure the publishers can do that, in fact I'm sure they have it figured to within several decimal points. I'm betting the figure is a lot lower than most people think it is, thus the price of the eBooks will be higher than a lot of people are hoping.
A reasonable comparison would the music industry, relatively inexpensive software and electronic distribution has let thousands of garage bands create and distribute music that as little 10 years ago would never have seen the light of day. Some of it deservedly so
Yes, there have been some that have been good, quality music, but there are still more songs/albums sold by the professionally produced, bigger named, artists. The same will hold true for books I'm sure.