Quote:
Originally Posted by saoir
I am not 100% sure what you are saying. However let's remember what early-adopter status usually results from. New products in the electronics field for example cost much more at the beginning because of enormous development costs and the risk that a new product won't succeed. Hence the high price.
I see no evidence from anyone here or elsewhere of any significant development or initial investment costs sufficient to justify these high costs and hence my statement about the mind-set of the Publishers.
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You might be partly right, but I doubt it is as simple as that.
People are demanding not only all new books coming out as ebooks, but also the complete back-catalogue. In both cases currently the market is still relatively small, keep in mind we are still early adaptors and ebooks are still a luxury product even compared to normal books.
The publishers need to convert an immense amount of works to ebook-format. Which might be easy, but especially for older works needs quite some effort - scanning, OCR, editing (although evidence suggests this is too often skipped
), formatting etc..
This all is an investment, which needs to be recovered. As far as I know publishers don't usually swim in money, and borrowing it in the current market might be a bit expensive as well. So it to me makes some sense that the publishers want to regain their investments in an as short as possible time to be able to keep on putting out books. If the publishers in their current form have a future is a different question, but I think they have some added value in the process of creating books I want to read.