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Go Read This | The Biggest Lie in Publishing | brett sandusky

~ Eoin Purcell ~ Leave a comment

Great post from Brett Sandusky here. I disagree with some of it, but the main thrust I agree with very much:

What I hope will be coming down the pike is not just an acceptance of direct-to-consumer as an necessary channel, but what I’ll call for now the curated distribution experience. Right now, we take so much time to polish our content and our products, and then we just throw away. All this content curation we’re doing or at the very least talking about makes no sense at all if we simply hand over the UX ownership to retailers and their locked devices. In fact, not owning the whole customer experience with regards to digital has basically reduced us to little more than book packagers for our retail partners. And, we’re not even getting paid for it.

via The Biggest Lie in Publishing | brett sandusky.

Things Publishers Fear: #4 ~ Price

~ Eoin Purcell ~ 5 Comments

I’ve put the fourth part of my series on modern publishing live over on EoinPurcell.com:

Price is a problem in the real world as well as the digital one. You only need to look to last winter’s price war in the US to see that. Amazon and Walmart kicked each other (and publishers) in the head to prove they had the best price for some key hardcover titles. The price point flavour of the day was $9.99. Then Target joined the fray.

The problem of course is that these price wars and ebook protests are driving a value perception home in consumers minds. On the one hand it reinforces the idea of ebooks being “worth” less than physical books and on the other, the price of physical books is too high, why else would retailers be selling them at such large discounts.