Quote:
Originally Posted by David Derrico
I think e-books will mean more opportunities for readers and writers, more people able to make a living writing, with fewer gatekeepers and entities in the distribution chain (like printers, shippers, warehouses, etc.) taking money along the way. Sure, there will be some crap along the way, but I think there will be more writing and more very very good writing (even if the "average" stays the same or goes down).
Books will be easier and less expensive to produce, easier and less expensive to purchase and read, and will hopefully reach more and more people. And I hope to see more quality but perhaps not "marketable" (read: regurgitated tripe meant for the lowest common denominator) writing see the light of day, once it doesn't require a business plan and huge publishing conglomerate in order to distribute a novel.
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I wish I could agree with this, but I don't think it's that simple.
Forget costs. The ultimate issue is that you are competing for the reader's discretionary
time. Reading is by nature a foreground activity. You can do something like listen to music in the background and do something else you are concentrating on in the foreground. You can't do that with a book, paper or electronic.
So you have to ask "Why would the reader read book X, when they could be watching TV/going to a movie/attending a sports event/going out to dinner/doing whatever else gives them pleasure?" The cost of the book may well be less than the cost of an alternative recreation, so it's unlikely cost alone will be a factor.
Depending upon who makes them, ebooks aren't going to be significantly less expensive to produce. There are a number of costs involved when a regular publisher produces a book. There will be a cost to acquire the book, the cost of editing, copy editing, and proofreading, the cost of markup and typesetting, the cost of cover design and illustration, and an allocated share of the overhead of the house that issues it that can't be directly attributed to a particular title. These costs will be present regardless of the form in which the book is issued. There are costs involved in manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution, but they are a minority of the total costs. (One editor I know places them at about 10% of the total costs for a book.)
If you take the publisher out of the equation, things change dramatically. It's possible for a writer to create and self-publish ebooks (or paper books, for that matter), and many do. But how many make a significant amount of money out of it, let alone a living?
The ultimate problem for the self-published author is simply letting the audience that wants to read her books know she and her books exist. Ultimately, that's what publishers do for writers, if badly: get the books out where the readers can see them.
Very few people out of the total pool of writers make a living doing it, and most self-published authors will be lucky to cover their costs.
The biggest problem confronting publishing is too many books chasing too few readers. Adding
more books isn't going to solve that problem.
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Dennis