I'll raise a different problem that's coming up. When I worked for a printer/publisher of children's books, titles selling only 10-20,000 copies a year were a real problem. (They were quality products selling in the $15-$25 range in today's prices.) Publishing wanted to do the book, but Production wanted to run 50,000 minimum. This resulted in piles of inventory of slow/low sellers - sometimes 5-10 years supply.
Electronic publishing of books will reduce or eliminate that set-up cost barrier for print, and that's a good and bad thing. Good becauise many interesting things will now be published. Bad because lots of garbage will flood the market with no cost barriers. Your problem will become finding good things to read among all the trash. Regards, Bob S. On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 9:17 AM, Mark Roberts <[email protected]> wrote: > mike wilson wrote: >> >> What will stop it is the lack of virtually free energy. When a set of AAs >> cost the equivalent of £200 at today's prices, what are you going to use >> them on? When your mains electricity is only on for a few hours each day, >> what are you going to have working? > > By that time, the printing presses and the trucks to distribute books will > be shut down. > > What really does stand a chance of stopping electronic books is the specter > of DRM that Bill Robb and Adam Maas have pointed out. Publishers' greed, in > other words. > > People have to be able to back up electronic books somehow, so that they can > be confident that if they drop, break or otherwise incapacitate their > reading device, they haven't lost the hundreds of books thay bought to store > on it. > > The real Achilles Heel of the whole enterprise isn't technological it is, as > usual human. > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and > follow the directions. > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
