Authors Feel Pinch in Age of E-Books
October 20th, 2010 | 
Author: Authors Feel Pinch in Age of E-Books
When literary agent Sarah Yake shopped around Kirsten Kaschock’s debut novel “Sleight” this year, she thought it would be a shoo-in with New York’s top publishers.
“Her project was one of the most exemplary in the last decade or so,” said Jed Rasula, who has taught in the English department at the University of Georgia since 2001. “I certainly thought she’d find a New York publisher.”
But the major New York publishers passed on “Sleight,” a novel about two sisters trained in a fictional art form. Coffee House Press in Minneapolis, a small independent publisher, now plans to publish the book, offering Ms. Kaschock an advance of about $3,500—a small fraction of the typical advances once paid by the major publishing houses.
(For the complete article, go to the original site here.)
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From Brian:
I have to take issue with one point here:
“Some book-industry experts say that lower e-book prices could increase overall unit sales eventually.”
I think these folks don’t understand a vital point about modern economics: for a typical reader, the price paid for a book, whether electronic or physical, is insignificant. The greater cost is time spent reading the book. Even if books were free in dollars, they’re still costly in the currency of time. We have limited hours in the day and an ever-growing set of competing demands on those hours.
There’s also the matter of availability. Print books have limited runs. If we want to make sure we’ll get to read a particular print book, we have to buy it when it comes out; otherwise it may be out of print when we’re ready to read it. This is one reason many serious readers have bought scores of books they’ve never read and probably never will. With ebooks, there’s no rush–they’ll be available somewhere forever, so why buy one before you’re ready to read it?