Quote:
Originally Posted by Kromm
Sales figures for a PDF tell us bupkis about how well a book will sell in shops. The PDF and book markets aren't closely correlated. Something can sell like mad in PDF and then rot on shelves. We have to make sure that rot is accounted for in our planning.
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The inability to determine likely book sales based on PDF sales was the missing factor - I had taken that as a given, when it seems it isn't at all. If you could get a decent estimate for a print book's sales given it's PDF sales, then you might be able to release the dead-tree book prior to the PDF book selling enough to completely pay for it and still have some certainty at recouping those costs. But if you
can't determine likely book sales, then you won't be able to do that.
I find it interesting that there's little correlation there, though. I kinda wish I could see a full dataset and see if I could fit it to a regression model, but that's something I find highly unlikely, seeing as you don't usually release sales data for dead-tree format. If PDF sales isn't a strong factor in dead-tree sales, I wonder what
are strong factors?