Quote:
Originally Posted by Raoul Duke
Books aren't ever going to go digital widespread. The majority of readers want no part in digital, and authors hate it - they're already signing clauses in publishing contracts that their books cannot be sold that way. They don't make enough money to become victims of piracy.
|
Nice generalizations. Authors do not hate it. The vast majority that I know are either cautiously optimistic or slightly pessimistic about ebooks. There's definitely the potential there to level the playing field, in the same way that the itunes store did for small record labels. I wouldn't be surprised to see the big literary stars to continue to release hardcover first (best profit margin), softcover a few months later, and then digital a while later. By this time, anyone who simply wants to read the book without paying for it would have gotten it out of the library. The number of sales lost to piracy would be negligible.
The big difficulty for small publishers is this: previously, you might do a print run of 1000 books, and sell maybe 800 of those for a typical run (looking at a typical small Canadian press). Now, let's say you make the book available through an ebook. Maybe you sell 600 ebooks and 400 softcover books. You've increased the number of units sold, and the ebooks have lower costs and thus a better profit margin. But your profit margin on your soft covers have dropped significantly: you can either drop your print run to 500 (which becomes hugely expensive on a per-unit cost); or you stick with a print-run of 1000, and allow for the possibility of being stuck with more boxes of unsold books. It'll take some careful work by publishers to make the new models work and still produce softcovers as well.
*edit: I should note that my numbers are exaggerated for effect. Obviously the ebook market wouldn't take 50% of the printed book market. But larger numbers more easily illustrate the trend.