Quote:
Originally Posted by raac
@mcl
you say that e-books are a free ride, but they're not really because they share a lot of the costs of the paper book (e.g. editorial and marketing). They must therefore contribute to that. As e-book sales go up, paper will go down. If there were a soar in the sales of under-priced e-books the publisher would loose money. It's possible publishers don't want to create a precedent for very cheap e-books for this very reason. I agree with you that they're too expensive but it's not fair to call them a free ride.
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You obviously didn't read what I wrote. They specifically DO NOT share the costs of editing or marketing, as there are no separate editing or marketing processes for ebooks. The pbook is edited. The pbook is marketed. The ebook is sold as just another format, and requires nor receives any significant additional editing nor marketing. For all intents and purposes, the ebook is nothing more than the TPB or MMPB version of a hardback, in terms of the editing. And there's a near-total lack of format marketing for the ebook, so you can't even compare the marketing of the PBs to ebooks.
ebook sales will not go up, because at the moment publishers are doing all within their power to see that they don't: DRM, delayed released, grossly inflated pricing, outright unavailability, bullying retailers. They don't want ebook sales to go up, because they're fighting tooth and nail to protect hardback sales.