elf: Quote: She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain (Fond of Books)
elf ([personal profile] elf) wrote in [community profile] ebooks 2010-06-27 01:59 pm (UTC)

I love Baen. I love that I can say, "see, the model WORKS"--Baen's sales have grown over the last decade, while they've had a free ebook library & no-DRM ebook sales, while other publishers are scrabbling to stay afloat.

Baen's model wouldn't work for everyone, but I really wish every publisher would look at them and say "which aspects of this can we use?" rather than "oh, that's only because they're a niche, genre market with a core group of devoted customers." (Which would work just as well for Tor, but that's owned by one of the big 6 companies who freak out at the idea of non-DRM'd ebooks.)

And I especially love Baen's attitude to ebook sharing--that popularity is good for them. They don't have all the books on the CDs in their free library, but they encourage distribution of the CDs. They encourage "read it & pass it along to a friend--yeah, even the ebook version that means you keep a copy."

They're aware that, eventually, this'll cause problems; when 80% of all book sales are electronic, at some point in the future, they won't be able to count on ebook sharing driving physical sales. But for now, ebooks are a niche, and they *can* use them to push hardcover sales. Other publishers seem to have missed that--that while many ebook customers won't buy hardcovers, if they're happy with the ebook, their friends will buy pbooks.

technical companies start publishing their manuals in either a usable PDF format

I dread more companies publishing PDFs, because they're so oblivious to what makes a good PDF. And I know they're not going to use ePub or Mobi, because those require rethinking the whole layout. But otherwise, yes; am looking forward to more nonfic ebooks, more *practical use* ebooks.

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