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Originally Posted by jasonkchapman
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.
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The market may not care.
But Manny Midlist won't
get a first printing of 250K. He'll be lucky if his first printing is 25K, and even luckier if he gets a second printing.
What the costs are will vary depending on advance. For instance, I've heard a convincing story from a friend who claims to have seen the numbers that
no publisher has made money on Steven King. His contract is
so good that what might have been their profit is his instead. They publish him for the status of doing so.
The friend in question has no reason to lie about this, and given the general stupidity of publishing, I can easily believe it. "Oh, yeah! We lose money on every copy sold, but we make it up on volume!"
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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.
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CDs and DVDs are standard formats. You can pop them into a player and expect to access the content.
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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.
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Oh, I concur. But I think we have to have a standard format and a streamlined delivery system. I also think we have to see pricing drop from the "early adopter" stage, but that will take a while.
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Dennis