I admit I was listening to it when I was going to sleep, but the one reason for the winnowing of publishing that I don’t remember hearing was that until recently, books were always printed, and large scale printing always been an expensive undertaking. They mostly try to decide to publish what they know will sell.

Even once paperbacks brought cost of books way down, it had to be typeset, massive rolls of paper had to be fed through giant machines, and someone had to decide how many thousand copies should be printed bound and shipped to stores.

The example of artificial scarcity where the electronic copies were not available is infuriating. The publisher was simply too hidebound (so to speak) to allow the downloadable version to be released before the paper hit the shelves since they cannot imagine electronic sales not hurting the paper sales. They couldn’t imagine all of the impulse buys of the electronic version any more than they can the book buyers that rarely touch paper.

I hope someone gave them an estimate of the book sales they lost because interest faded before the paper was available to be purchased.