Quote:
Originally Posted by wgrimm
Anyways, my idea for gently introducing publishers to the ebook market is use of backlists. Publishers have tens of thousands of good books on their backlists that are not in print and hence generating no income- start publishing these as ebooks at reasonable prices ($4 or $5). Genre markets like SF might do very well. So might books that were good but not very big sellers. The reason that ebooks have not "taken off" is publisher greed and lack of vision.
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That's a great idea, though there is one problem that applies to many books; who owns the digital rights? All the recent contracts go into this in great detail, but this was not case 10, 20, 30 years ago, so I think that's a big hurdle for publishers; when the stake is high they will go for it (see Disney's battle about Winnie the Pooh's subsidiary rights with the estate of the author), but for marginal books and for so many of them, they do not have the incentive, manpower..