I wonder what Google's Book Library quest to bring out-of-print / old books
etc back into mainstream consciousness with their scanning and digital
archiving will do to the sector. I know there are lots of pros / cons to
this and the lawyers are getting bigger pension pots from it.
In the long run digital prints will I think go the same way of becoming an
archive - in what format I don't know. Server costs vs storage space is
reducing and feeding the expansion of cloud hosting so I don't think it will
be a limitation, at least in the short-medium term.
-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Jones (Trancendance)
Sent: Monday, April 29, 2013 11:38 PM
To: 'feistfans-l'
Subject: RE: ebooks out of..... print?
Of course, given the growth in storage capacity being brought about by
nanotechnologies, graphene and other such materials, and the proportionally
reducing amount of data that it will take to store books, it is conceivable
that all (future) books will be available, if not for immediate purchase,
for retrieval from a library archive. I know that the British Library has a
long running digitisation and archiving project, although some past texts
and recordings are just too old and fragile to be converted, and it is
likely that eventually these will be lost forever.
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Raymond
Feist
Sent: 29 April 2013 23:24
To: feistfans-l
Subject: Re: ebooks out of..... print?
On Apr 29, 2013, at 2:27 PM, Paddyjack <[email protected]> wrote:
Ray,
I was wondering about something..... in the printing world, there is of
course a limited amount of books that are printed, and once you get to the
end of that for one particular book, then it's done and final unless you
get to get a second edition, a third etc. It means that some books can no
longer be found in bookstores except second hand stores.
Now, with the ebooks era, how does that work? Is there a limited "copies"
that has to be sold, or are these books going to be in e-stores forever?
Is there something about this in contracts with publishers?
Curious about this.
PJ
it's a different paradigm. If you look at the US paperbacks for
Silverthorn, for example, it's in it's (I think) 37th printing. Magician
got a do-over when the '92 revised text hit, because that was a new ISBN.
Anyway, as my books never go out of print so far, its academic unless you're
a 1st edition collector.
E-books will have out of print, I expect, if there comes a time when it's
just not downloading, which I can imagine for several reasons. Even though
e-books have different fixed overhead, server space costs money. Yes, you
can put a bazillion books on servers if you're design is scaleable enough
and you have the money to buy blade servers, but at what point do you keep a
book on that hasn't been downloaded in five years? And there's a question
of a reader finding a book. Say we were talking and I mentioned some old
Science Fiction author from the 1960s I loved, and you decided to go look
for him/her. That's one way, but if nobody's talking about that writer, the
book just sits there, because the publisher is not spending a dime on
attracting an audience.
It's a different retail channel and we don't know yet exactly how it plays
out, so I guess my answer is books will linger far longer, but probably like
print not forever.
Best, R.E.F.
----
www.crydee.com
Never attribute to malice what can satisfactorily be explained away by
stupidity.
