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Originally Posted by KevinH
Then the publishing world is way behind the times.
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Why, because they haven't spent considerable sums of money on unpredictable future infrastructures over the past 5 or 10 years, to cater to a nearly non-existent market...?
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Originally Posted by KevinH
In academic journal publishing, they have been asking for electronic copies (not pdfs) for journal articles and figures, tables, etc, for more than than the last 15 years.
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Sure, but academic journals (and other periodicals) have used electronic distribution for a long time. 15 years ago, the ebook market was beyond non-existent.
Even if the publishers had stipulated a format that 15 years ago, chances are it would still require work to convert into a viable ebook format.
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Originally Posted by KevinH
Even if that cost is $800 per book (one full person day fully costed at $100/hr) it is insignificant when split over the number of units sold.
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Keep in mind, though, that around 45,000 new new fiction books are released each year. At $800 per book, that is $36,000,000. For one year. If it takes 30 minutes to do each one, that's 22,500 hours of work.
I concur that the costs are generally quite low, and as more conversions happen the cost will go down. But they can't just snap their fingers and convert every single book in the back catalog overnight.
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Originally Posted by KevinH
It is funny how all publishers want to talk price and not cost, isn't it.
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Actually they discuss cost every now and then, as indicated by a recent NYT article which listed many of the costs. People just don't want to hear the counter-intuitive idea that paper costs are far, far lower than they believe.