Of course, given the growth in storage capacity being brought about by nanotechnologies, graphene and other such materials, and the proportionally reducing amount of data that it will take to store books, it is conceivable that all (future) books will be available, if not for immediate purchase, for retrieval from a library archive. I know that the British Library has a long running digitisation and archiving project, although some past texts and recordings are just too old and fragile to be converted, and it is likely that eventually these will be lost forever.
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Raymond Feist Sent: 29 April 2013 23:24 To: feistfans-l Subject: Re: ebooks out of..... print? On Apr 29, 2013, at 2:27 PM, Paddyjack <[email protected]> wrote: > Ray, > > I was wondering about something..... in the printing world, there is of > course a limited amount of books that are printed, and once you get to the > end of that for one particular book, then it's done and final unless you get > to get a second edition, a third etc. It means that some books can no longer > be found in bookstores except second hand stores. > > Now, with the ebooks era, how does that work? Is there a limited "copies" > that has to be sold, or are these books going to be in e-stores forever? Is > there something about this in contracts with publishers? > > Curious about this. > > PJ > it's a different paradigm. If you look at the US paperbacks for Silverthorn, for example, it's in it's (I think) 37th printing. Magician got a do-over when the '92 revised text hit, because that was a new ISBN. Anyway, as my books never go out of print so far, its academic unless you're a 1st edition collector. E-books will have out of print, I expect, if there comes a time when it's just not downloading, which I can imagine for several reasons. Even though e-books have different fixed overhead, server space costs money. Yes, you can put a bazillion books on servers if you're design is scaleable enough and you have the money to buy blade servers, but at what point do you keep a book on that hasn't been downloaded in five years? And there's a question of a reader finding a book. Say we were talking and I mentioned some old Science Fiction author from the 1960s I loved, and you decided to go look for him/her. That's one way, but if nobody's talking about that writer, the book just sits there, because the publisher is not spending a dime on attracting an audience. It's a different retail channel and we don't know yet exactly how it plays out, so I guess my answer is books will linger far longer, but probably like print not forever. Best, R.E.F. ---- www.crydee.com Never attribute to malice what can satisfactorily be explained away by stupidity.
