{"id":1417,"date":"2010-11-08T08:57:32","date_gmt":"2010-11-08T08:57:32","guid":{"rendered":"\/ifbookblog\/?p=1417"},"modified":"2010-11-08T08:57:32","modified_gmt":"2010-11-08T08:57:32","slug":"lost_book_sales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/2010\/11\/08\/lost_book_sales\/","title":{"rendered":"lost book sales"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jane Litte recently launched lostbooksales.com<\/a>, a site where readers tell the tale of how a publisher lost a sale because a book wasn’t available in a certain territory or format. While lostbooksales.com is a valiant effort to collect and codify examples of friction in the current supply chain, I think it’s important not to exaggerate how much of the problems facing publishers are a function of the mismatch between an outdated rights structure and the electronic distribution pipe which is technically geography agnostic and format flexible.
\nJane explains that the motivation for the site came from a comment <\/a>someone named Suze posted on her DearAuthor blog<\/p>\n

If I had the time and computer savvy, I’d set up a lostebooksale.com site where people could submit each book they didn’t buy, and why. After the first three or four hundred stories about “I didn’t buy Book X because it’s not available in my country, so I got a pirate copy”, maybe somebody in publisher with the drive, imagination, and ability could prod the industry into action.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

God knows publishers need to be prodded into action, but the action needs to be much more extensive than rationalizing rights. The shift from page to screen is taking place in a much broader context in which media consumption, in all it’s rapidly proliferating forms, is moving from atoms to bits. And those bits all swim in the same sea and move through the same pipe. All of them competing for our attention.
\nI’d be keen to see lostbooksales expanded so that people could say “i didn’t buy a book because i got the information i needed off a website, or because i figured i would rather watch Season 2 of The Wire<\/em>, play World of Warcraft<\/em>, or even read some of the classics which are now available free in almost every electronic format.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jane Litte recently launched lostbooksales.com, a site where readers tell the tale of how a publisher lost a sale because a book wasn’t available in a certain territory or format. While lostbooksales.com is a valiant effort to collect and codify examples of friction in the current supply chain, I think it’s important not to exaggerate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}