She’s over-reacting, I think. Most of those eight hundred downloads are not lost sales. Others in the thread have pointed out the collector mentality of many downloaders. If those eight hundred people were reading her book and loving it, then spreading the word, her demand would go through the roof and her sales would as well.
That isn’t to say I agree with downloading, at least in all instances. I’ve said before I have no problem with people who buy a hard copy of my books downloading a digital copy. I think the technology should be there for this to happen already. However, I hate it when people download because of the sentiment of: “Screw you; I don’t like DRM, or the fact that the book is too expensive, or that it’s not out in my region.”
You’re not helping, you’re hurting. If you don’t agree, don’t buy the book. Don’t read the book. Buy and read something else—something that meets your requirements. THAT will influence change. The other way just influences the publishers to put on stronger DRM and charge more.
However, there’s one important point I think both sides of this argument need to realize. This might be THE most important thing for people to realize on the ebook front: Books cannot be consumed as quickly as music or movies. That changes everything.
To those saying: Make all ebooks $.99 and watch the sales skyrocket. (And also to those who complain about the numbers of books being pirated, seeing them all as sales.) Well…I’m skeptical. Certainly, ebooks should be cheaper than they are now. But there’s not the same economy of scale here that there is on other forms of media. Reading a book takes a long time. Even hardcore readers are strongly bound by how much time they have to read.
In preparation to write the next Wheel of Time book, I am re-reading the entire series. I just finished the first book. It took me twelve days, reading full time. (About half my time was spent building outlines or researching notes, though, so let’s cut that in half.) That means it took about week to read that book, reading full-time.
How many books of that length can someone read in a year? Fifty, if you read all the time? That’s for a hardcore reader. A lot of readers have re-read the Eheel of Time series in preparation for the upcoming final book release. The average I hear from them is 6-8 months for 12 novels. So we’re looking at people reading 24 books a year, at the length I write, for many readers. I’d guess that your average reader is reading fewer.
Compare that to how many music tracks you can listen to, or films you can watch, if you’re equivalently into that form of media. Money is not the limiting resource for readers, not as much as time is. If all prices on books go down greatly, demand will not increase (at least in smaller genres, like sf/f) because there just isn’t a large enough group of people willing to dedicate their time to the books.
Hopefully, ereaders will help us grow our audience, and hopefully we’ll see prices come down farther than they’ve come down right now. But it’s not as simple as many make it out to be.
(Some facts for you: I watched the latest Grisham book because I was up against him for bestseller lists. If I have his numbers right, his sales on this book in physical plus his digital sales equaled about the same number as his last novel sold—despite the fact that the ebook is $10 and the hardcover, even discounted greatly by Amazon, was $15. Most places would have sold it at $20. Having a cheaper ebook did not create many more sales because many people who wanted to read Grisham books were already reading them. It would be curious to see if the book had been $.99 how many more readers there would have been. Undoubtedly more. But ten times as many? Knowing what I do of the numbers of books sold, I’d call that near impossible.)
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