Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
People will pay the same whether you invest up front or not.
but people will only pay once for a book. so if h.p. has to print and ship _two_ books to make that customer happy, they've lost money on that sale. that's why they'd "invest", up-front, to ensure they won't have to face that prospect.
I think we differ in our assumptions about the economics. My thinking is that having a huge back-catalogue of titles is mostly a marketing gimmick. I anticipate that perhaps 1% of the available titles would ever get ordered by anyone. That means that 99% would not have to have any investment put into them at all in order to fill a slot in the back-catalogue. In my vision, time spent on doing *anything* non-mechanical to a book is, on average, 99% wasted. Better to let the market help identify the 1% of valuable titles and concentrate your scarce fixup attentions on those. Assuming that even without manual review 99% of your titles are actually fine as far as scan quality and completeness goes, you are actually quite likely to get away with a 1 part in 10,000 return rate. And customers might not actually *read* the whole book either. If 50% wind up on shelves unread, or have problems that are annoying, but that don't result in returns, the return rate drops to 1 in 20,000. And if, in the end, they have to ship two copies to a customer, they only have to do *that* once. After a return they can go and fix up that exact book, and never have to double-ship that one again. ============================================================ Gardner Buchanan <gbuchana@teksavvy.com> Ottawa, ON FreeBSD: Where you want to go. Today.