which item would you ask the publisher to change?

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  • anappo - 14 years ago

    On subject of geo restrictions. There appear to be three rather strange notions to justify existence of those.

    1. It's authors and agents who are demanding it, not publishers.

    Those authors have contracts with whom? With publishers? Authors have so much clout these days that they can dictate terms to publishing houses? Ok.. So, the publishers willingly enter into binding contracts that they full well know to contain utter nonsense in modern content delivery infrastructure. Next slide please.

    2. It is more profitable for authors and agents to sell the same book to separate regions.

    Right. Where does all the money that revolves in your industry come from? The customer, right? All the cash that ends up with an author is some portion out of total number of copies sold times price paid by customers. What geo restrictions are designed to do is to prevent some portion of those sales from happening. What they also manage to accomplish as a side effect is they piss off a portion of your customers to a degree that not even the ongoing DRM disaster has failed to piss them off so far. You have somehow managed to convince yourself that reducing the number of sales (and customers) is financially profitable for authors. Good luck convincing others.

    3. The mess with non-global exclusive contracts is an historical artifact, ebooks being such a new and novel thing.

    I cannot honestly remember, but my best guess is that the first electronic text I downloaded (from a gopher site? or was it fidonet?) some time in 1992 or 93. That's more or less two decades ago. Baen has been doing fine with ebooks for more than 10 years now. If an industry cannot adapt to radically changed circumstances within two+ decades then whatever happens to such industry in future is, amongst other things, well deserved.

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