--- Kevin Burton Smith <kvnsmith@...> wrote:
>
> (Mind you -- Palmdale isn't exactly the most literate area of the
> country so I could be wrong. Boston, however, is a great book town.
> What's the used bookstore situation there these days, Dave?)
>
Boston, Brookline, Cambridge all still have their share of used bookstores, but it's not the way it used to be. In the good old days (20+ years ago), there were some great used bookstores in Boston with Victor Hugo being probably the best. I'd have great finds (or at least what I thought at the time were great finds)--things like a complete set of Dan Marlowe's Operation books (okay, they turned out to be a bitter disappointment, but still I was looking for them), Robert E. Howard's with the Frank Frazetta covers, etc. When Waterstones took over the old Exeter Theatre location it killed a lot of the small bookstores in the area (and then they went away thanks to amazon).
> My guess -- and it's only a guess -- is that most ARCs and e-ARCs will
> eventually end up in the hands of the relatively small number of buffs
> and collectors or simply get tossed out or erased; not the general
> public who have the real buying clout.
>
I doubt ARCs have much of an effect on sales, just like I have my doubts whether giving away electronic copies will have any effect positive or negative either. It's probably more of a mild annoyance to authors when they see their ARCs being sold--even more so when they're being sold by online review sites that never bothered to review them in the first place!
--Dave
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 13 May 2009 EDT