In message <[log in to unmask]>, [log in to unmask]
mhs.compuserve.com writes
>Also, Amazon.com is wrecking the business of many medium to small
>publishers, and is responsible especially in the university and academic
>presses for dwindling non-discounted sales which have turned the
>heads of those presses' commissioning editors away from books of
>advanced (if not celebrity) scholarship which would never have sold
>more than a few hundred copies. It and other on-line book indices
>confirm the assumption of most customers that books are overpriced and
>the prices charged by booksellers, especially small and independent
>ones, grossly inflated.
I don't know anything about Amazon but I think it's unfair to blame them
or other on-line book suppliers for a situation which goes back at least
to the mid-eighties. My own business at the Poetry Bookshop in so far as
it dealt with new books was effectively wrecked at that time by
discounted direct sales by publishers themselves. The Bloodaxe campaign
was the highest-profile example. I agree about the effect the situation
has on public perception of book prices; I'm just uneasy about attaching
the blame to any particular outfit. I don't blame the publishers; my own
experience of being one includes frustration that I have to hike up
prices to the 'public' in order not to make a loss when I sell to the
trade - at the same time as my trade sales are minimal in comparison
with direct mail-order. That's just one of a complexity of economic
factors and Tony's right that we're in a transitional phase - although
I'm not sure whether it's not 'obvious which way the market will go', in
some respects anyway: the prospects for small new book specialist
retailers look pretty bleak and I guess that at least in poetry the
future will lie with direct-to-publisher probably on-line sales.
Alan Halsey
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