Quote:
Originally Posted by zerospinboson
If there is a way to get a representative sample of 'paper' buyers to read the things on e-readers, I don't see why you couldn't use ebook 'sales' (or ratings) as an indicating for whether or not to do a paper run. After seeing how indicative ebook sales/ratings are for paper sales, they can then decide whether or not to invest additional money in the book or not.. It's not really rational to become more risk-acceptant if expected value is lower than the expected cost. (Yes, they will have a different EV calculated when they decide to do so anyway, but that's only because they don't trust the statistics/sample then.)
Of course, this all requires flexible thinking, and some risk-taking, which may be unrealistic for those status quo thinkers, but that's what being a company in a free-market society is all about.
Still, I don't really see what they have to lose. If they're losing money on most of the titles anyway, the possibility of losing some money on a small-ish pilot project shouldn't matter too much.
Explore/exploit. Landscapes shift. ;-)
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Trying new things is a good idea, but this one is quite likely to cost the publishers their shirt.
They're still incurring most of the same costs they are currently under your model as they do under the current model, but now they're starting off by selling to a small percentage of the market (and if I follow you for a lower price) and if they do manage to sell these ebooks to paper book readers they'll sell to the "must have it now" crowd who would normally pay the higher prices.
They would lose a lot more money than they do currently.
You would likely not see that many bestsellers either - because part of the bestseller phenomenon comes from huge displays of perhaps hundreds of books at the front of the bookstore - and there's no way to replicate that with ebooks.
Profit margins are too slim as it is, they just can't afford it without serious cost-cutting measures and the people who would suffer most are writers, artists, and editors; because it's their pay or jobs that would be cut.