Awesome. Now if we could get some other companies to pay attention...
And then I realized you wrote Australia, which probably explains a lot of it. I mean, that's one oddball nutjob country for book costs. When I visited, I had a book I'd finished on the plane -- grr, talk about bad planning, character dies in second-to-last paragraph OH MY GOD CLIFFHANGER GET ME TO A BOOKSTORE -- etc, etc. I find book, I flip to back, I see it's... holy crap, in USD it comes to $18. I nearly dropped the book in shock. It's paperback. It can't be more than 100K. And they want HOW MUCH?
Books in Australia are, for no real reason I could discern, unbelievably incredibly outrageously expensive... and then we'd walk into a used bookstore down the street, pick up eighteen books and drop about 30USD to get them. Very, very bizarre.
In which case it's possible Penguin's selling out because the Aussies are just so thrilled to find a book priced in the single-digits? Heh, but still, the point stands, I think: if you know you want the contents and your mind is made up, you don't require the bells & whistles.
Which is why I'd addendum on my idea that a book's first printing could be hardcopy, but after that be in ebook/net format -- because by then, perhaps, readers would have multiple friends/reviewers out there to convince them to buy regardless of cover/looks. Maybe?
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Date: 11 Jan 2009 01:46 am (UTC)And then I realized you wrote Australia, which probably explains a lot of it. I mean, that's one oddball nutjob country for book costs. When I visited, I had a book I'd finished on the plane -- grr, talk about bad planning, character dies in second-to-last paragraph OH MY GOD CLIFFHANGER GET ME TO A BOOKSTORE -- etc, etc. I find book, I flip to back, I see it's... holy crap, in USD it comes to $18. I nearly dropped the book in shock. It's paperback. It can't be more than 100K. And they want HOW MUCH?
Books in Australia are, for no real reason I could discern, unbelievably incredibly outrageously expensive... and then we'd walk into a used bookstore down the street, pick up eighteen books and drop about 30USD to get them. Very, very bizarre.
In which case it's possible Penguin's selling out because the Aussies are just so thrilled to find a book priced in the single-digits? Heh, but still, the point stands, I think: if you know you want the contents and your mind is made up, you don't require the bells & whistles.
Which is why I'd addendum on my idea that a book's first printing could be hardcopy, but after that be in ebook/net format -- because by then, perhaps, readers would have multiple friends/reviewers out there to convince them to buy regardless of cover/looks. Maybe?