On Jun 5, Steven Brust said:
>At 10:05 PM 6/4/2002 -0700, Frank Mayhar wrote:
>
>>One word: Remaindering. A pernicious practice that is one of the things
>>killing the paperback industry.
>
>Well, remaindering *is* pretty silly, but it's been going on for a lot
>longer than the paperback crunch.
It's still black necromancy.
>And in a sense, it actually helps: it
>permits smaller bookstores to take a chance with unknown authors. They
>know they can buy a box or so without risk.
The end may justify the means, though. I saw Dreamhaven doing that,
sigh.
In a weird way, mass-market paperbacks had the problem of digital
copyright before digital got anywhere: the cost of the materials was
_considered_ negligible (don't know if it actually was, as it is in
digital); it's having that author's words you're paying for.
>No, Rachel explained what has caused the real crunch.
I wish my parents could spell.
>Instead of a lot of distributors working their areas and responding
>("Hey, Jim, give us more westerns next time; people around here seem to
>like westerns") you have Ingrams, which gives you (the drug store with
>a book rack, or the airport, or whatever) the top ten NYT bestsellers
>and a few others that they pick out.
I was going to say that that was a while back (drugstore and airport
racks being of any use) and that the paperback market survived the
collapse of the ID channels, and then I realized I didn't know if that
was actually the case. Did sales actually survive, and the later
consolidations kill them; or did they never quite recover, and stagger
woozily to their extended demise?
Rachael
--
Rachael From the Dilbert Newsletter:
Lininger "You should talk to her.
rachael@ She is a minefield of information."
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