I've long complained about how e-books are priced. I really don't see why I should be paying such a significant amount of the hardback price for a book that requires no printing, no paper, no shipping, no storage. Evidence supports cheap e-books causing more print sales. Mercedes Lackey has said that after she permitted one of her books to be distributed for free at Baen Books Free Library, sales of all of ehr books rose markedly. I get mine from Fictionwise, Baen Books, Palm Digital, and even author's websites and I have amassed a large collection of the things very quickly.
All this is old news. Just got a flyer from Palm Digital: Peter David's latest Star Trek "New Frontier" book is coming out in hardback October 28. The e-book is now available for under $5.
I want to see more of this, a lot more. I want more books! More, more...
Posted by Dan_raven (Member # 3383) on :
At a writers convention I went to a year ago this was brought up.
What you are dealing with is a bunch of people who have been workign thier industry for 30 or 40 years. They have invested heavilly in print and publishing hardware and plants.
To them, aggresively marketing e-books undermines their investment, both financially in publishing plants, and emotionally, in the "Book" field.
There is also the question of, will we need a publishing company if all books are e-books? If you are CEO of a multi-million dollar international company you like the situation as it is.
To make money an author needs to get thier book put on paper and marketed. They come to you or your competitors. Even if the author wanted to sell his book cheaply on the internet, they couldn't get it to a print market without some big $$ behind them.
So authors have to surrender thier publishing plans to the big companies and their marketing or face obscurity. 90% of books are paper. 10% are electronic.
If this were reversed, with 90% electronic, and only 10% paper (where the market may be heading in 20 years) then anyone with an internet connection could sell their own books without a publisher, or make their own deals for that small 10% that wants to hold the paper.
No Publishing CEO likes that future. So they hope to postpone if not choke E-Books with unnecessarilly high pricing.
Posted by TheTick (Member # 2883) on :
Sounds just like the mindset of the recording industry, just not as brutally efficient. Posted by Chris Bridges (Member # 1138) on :
That's why I like Baen books. They've embraced e-books (and even free e-books) in a big way, and it's paid off for their print sales.
Posted by Christy (Member # 4397) on :
That's great to know. I'll check out Baen books. I've mostly been doing the free public domain books so far.
I like the storage options for e-books. Especially, as you mentioned elsewhere I think, that there are many books that I pick up just for quick entertainment and not to collect or keep.
Posted by saxon75 (Member # 4589) on :
Despite some recent advances such as eInk and other technologies that would help eBooks become more feasible, I really don't see eBooks being a replacement product for print books. Aside from the intangible factors (comfort, personality, etc) print does have some distinct advantages. While eBooks become more and more cost-effective as your library expands, the initial investment will likely always be greater than for a paperback. Also, you just can't flip through pages as easily or quickly on a monitor. That's actually bigger than you might think, given that most readers don't read in a strictly linear fashion.
Electronic books will probably become more common in the marketplace, eventually, but I seriously doubt that they will ever replace print.
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