Douglas Preston on consumers, entitlement and e-books:
“The sense of entitlement of the American consumer is absolutely astonishing,” said Douglas Preston, whose novel “Impact” reached as high as No. 4 on The New York Times’s hardcover fiction best-seller list earlier this month. “It’s the Wal-Mart mentality, which in my view is very unhealthy for our country. It’s this notion of not wanting to pay the real price of something.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Publishers haven’t done themselves, the readers or the writers any favors by offering books for free or dirt-cheap. In fact, I know they haven’t. Any reader who doesn’t get that the low price of an e-book was to get you to buy the READER–hello, this is the same reason iTunes was originally DRM, so you’d have to buy the iPOD–is missing the boat. Publishers–primarily driven by Amazon’s desire to sell the Kindle (and, originally, the Sony eReader before Sony wised up)–capitulated to a piece of tech. Now they’re trying to take back control, which is much harder to do once you’ve let someone else control expectations.
Check out the entire article here.
