Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
It can't be. There will be fixed costs that will be the same for Joe Bestseller and Manny Midlist. (For a similar sized manuscript, line-editing, copy editing, proofreading, typesetting, and pre-press should be about the same.)
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I understand all that, but it's not the point. All else being equal, you're still faced with a difference of, say, a $1 million dollar advance plus promo budget vs. a $3,000 advance and none. On a first printing of 250k, that's at least $4 each. My point is that the mass market doesn't care. It's a $22 hardback and the blurb looks interesting. Fine.
The real difference in perceived value is, as phrodod pointed out, that e-books are playerless media. CDs and DVDs are playerless media, too, but there's never been an all-in-one solution to those, so the market never learned to expect it.
Through the life of this thread, I've seen at least four different ways in which the e-book concept could win market acceptance. Any one of them would work for a different segment of the potential market (with some overlap, I assume). None of them would work for the entire potential market. Just looking at the past conversations on convergence vs. stand-alone readers demonstrates that point.
But that's okay. If any of them works, someone will try others. I don't care if it's one vendor end-to-end, a Mobipocket-like middleman solution, or cheap disposable media. Whatever gets the market moving is fine with me.