Digital Rebellion
The "Cloud Wars" Have Begun! However, even the best-laid plans of GaGa can run afoul...
"I could sell 10,000 ebooks a day, and it would still take the rest of my life to saturate the current market." ~ JA Konrath
New York, New York – – Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, today expanded its bestselling digital reading offering with the All-New NOOK, The Simple Touch Reader. With a full touchscreen, NOOK™ features record-setting, extra-long battery life on the easiest-to-use, ultra-light, portable 6-inch eReader with the most-advanced E Ink Pearl display, and the world’s largest bookstore available by Wi-Fi®. Now available for pre-order at www.nook.com and at Barnes & Noble stores for just $139, NOOK will begin shipping on or about June 10.
To set the tone for this article, you need to keep at the front of your mind that from the teens through 20 and 30-somethings and sometimes beyond, INTERNET=FREE. That's the mindset when it comes to "buying" material, whether it be newspapers, eBooks, Lady GaGa mp3 music: keep it as close to "FREE" (even 99cents will do) as possible!
Author JA Konrath ::: "ebooks are more like a commodity. But not quite, because they don't conform to the rules of supply and demand, as there is an endless supply. But I believe there is also an endless demand."
Konrath hits target dead center here. Funny it is, the lower your price, the more you sell. Sell more lower your price. Wow. I sound like Yoda there!
Michael Levin blogs via GreecePost.com that Amazon effectively killed the pasttime of stopping by a bookstore for a bit of "browsing" ... and then he cuts to the chase:::
...the real reason why books are going to vanish is the remarkably un-businesslike business model of the publishers. Think of General Motors — decades of inefficiency, but without the federal bailouts.JA Konrath believes that eBooks "will become the dominant format for reading fiction. They'll proliferate the US and Canada, the UK and Australia, and eventually the world. There's no ebook bubble. There is only unlimited potential sales." Konrath referred to it in a different post as a Gold Rush.
In no other industry do producers actually wait passively to see what products are suggested to them, instead of doing market research to see what people really want to buy. Yet publishers seldom generate book ideas; instead they wait for literary agents to submit proposals. Houses decide which book to publish based on little more than a gut feeling that says, “I think we can make money selling this!”
Yet the books that publishers choose are almost entirely of zero interest to actual bookbuyers. After 9/11, there were a ton of books about 9/11, which nobody bought. Same thing with the Iraq War, the rise of Obama, the economic meltdown and even, inexplicably, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Or the books are rehashed business lessons, religious truths, sports clichés, motivational babble, exercise fads, weight loss techniques or pandering to the political left or the right. Who wants these books? Almost no one.
Most of the major publishers today are owned by international conglomerates who, at some point, will awaken to the realization that English majors in their employ are spending millions of dollars on books that no one wants to read.
As a result, few trade books earn real money for the publisher (and certainly not for the author!). That’s because the publisher bears the entire risk of buying, editing, printing and shipping copies of the book to bookstores all over the country on a 100 percent returnable basis. If your local Barnes & Noble doesn’t sell a particular book, it goes right back to the publisher, at the publisher’s shipping cost, for a full refund. Especially in the Internet era, you can’t make money putting books on trucks and hoping someone buys them.
What are you waiting for? A gilded invitation? Write, my people, write!
Tags: Konrath, eBooks, eBooks, kindle
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