[free-sklyarov] A publisher that "gets it"

[Christopher R. Maden]

At 08:29 24-08-2001, Stephen R. Savitzky wrote:
>I found this link on rec.music.filk:  http://www.baen.com/library/
>Eric Flint's introduction is dead on.  Here's the first paragraph:
>
>Just so there's no mistake, one of the formats offered is HTML; the
>readers they link to are Netscape and MSIE.  They also offer RTF.
>
>As I said, these guys get it.

They've actually been doing this for a while.  And the interesting thing is 
that the free ebooks have *not* cannibalized their print sales; the titles 
for which the ebooks are available have sold better than those without, on 
average.  So this definitely shows that, for dual-media publishers, fewer 
restrictions are better business.

It's still an open question, to some degree, how well this works for 
publishers that *only* publish electronically.  Baen has the paper channel 
to make money, but if you are only distributing ebooks with no DRM, then 
there is at least the potential that rampant copying costs you real money.

To bring this back on-topic, though: most of Adobe's ebook customers, as I 
understand it, are Big Publishers, issuing ebook editions of works they 
have in print.  They have no excuse.

-crism
-- 
Christopher R. Maden, XML Consultant
DTDs/schemas - conversion - ebooks - publishing - Web - B2B - training
<URL: http://crism.maden.org/consulting/ >
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