JK accused of undercutting sales
p2pnet.net News:- What does the latest Harry Potter book have in common with Hollywood’s latest movies?
It ended up online within hours of its ‘official` release but, as with the studio flics, that won`t make a blind bit of difference to sales. In fact, it`ll probably enhance them.
But Potter author JK Rowling has been attacked for undercutting her own ‘legal’ sales by allowing supermarkets to sell copies at half price.
Such “extreme discounting” could put small bookshops out of business, Birmingham Selly Oak MP MP Lynne Jones says, according to business.scotsman.com.
“I note that copies of Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince are selling in supermarkets for as little as £4.99 compared with the trade price for lower volume outlets of £10.70 and the retail price of £16.99,” she says in an EDM [Early Day Motion], going on:
“I therefore call on publishers and best-selling authors like JK Rowling to consider the threat to the viability of bookshops of such practices offering a full range of titles and to set terms in publishing contracts to prevent this extreme discounting.”
And ten MPs have put down another EDM defending Ms Rowling against criticism from the Pope that her books might encourage children to become interest in the occult, says business.scotsman.com.
Meanwhile, in its first full day on the market, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince pulled in around 250,000 sales per hour and during the same period, it was scanned and appearing on dedicated IRC channels.
“Although Potter has become a multimedia cash cow, with 52 million books sold and products ranging from figurines to a $2.35 billion movie series, Rowling has so far decided against publishing the stories in e-book format, a medium growing by up to 40 percent annually, according to the New York-based Open eBook Forum, a trade body,” says Wired News.
It was clearly inevitable that whatever Rowling and her publishers did or didn’t decide, devotees would scan the book and post it. But as with movies that show up on the networks, there’s no substitute for the real thing and dire predictions of lost sales due to p2p file sharing are sheer flatulence.
The entertainment and software cartels are spending billions of dollars hyping the message that file sharing costs them untold amounts in revenues and exposes their workers to financial hartdship.
However, it’s never been demonstrated that shared files have resulted in the loss of a single sale and the cartels continue to report staggering revenues, p2p notwithstanding.
And it won’t be any different with Harry Potter.
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See:-
business.scotsman.com – JK under fire as Half Blood Prince sold at half price, July 21, 2005
dedicated IRC – Harry Potter already online, July 18, 2005
Wired News – Pirates of the Potter-ian, July 21, 2005
