Quote:
Originally Posted by Kromm
The old days when it made sense to print 1,000-2,000 copies and let them sell out over years are gone. They were on their way out when I was hired in 1995, but the writing was on the wall even then.
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To expand a bit on what Kromm said here, this is largely because the U.S. changed the laws on warehoused resources sometime in the recent past (the late 1990s or early 2000s seems about right in my mind). It used to be that books gathering dust in a warehouse were considered a liability; you needed to pay for the warehousing of them, after all, and they weren't making you any money.
Nowadays, books in a warehouse are considered an asset; if you have 2,000 $20 books in a warehouse, that's considered $40,000 in assets, and you need to pay taxes on it accordingly.
This led to a
huge incentive to try to print only as many as you could sell reasonably quickly... and to destroy/liquidate any copies you
couldn't sell after a fairly short time frame.