Cheaper e-books will kill us, says publisher

[fugazied]

oh give me a break. A SINGLE person could transfer a manuscript into other formats, it's just a software issue. Once in e-book format there is no reproduction cost, no printing costs.

Then he is complaining about the staff necessary to count the money the ebooks make and track sales? Priceless. As for the cost of servers, seriously a couple of thousand a month could pay for those, and store millions of dollars worth of books in a few gigabytes of space.

Many of the infrastructure costs he mentions are already in place and often handled by third parties, for example Amazon.com. Publishers should be embracing this technology instead of making excuses for why a book with essentially tiny re-production costs should cost $20.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by starrigger

But maybe that "limited markup" isn't what you want for your paper book. Maybe you want to make use of the options that today's technology gives us, in the look and feel of book text. (But which is, for the most part, not easy to replicate in an ebook.)

The original problem was only generating eBooks. But the point was that by restricting your choices you can get something that works. You have to think about the whole chain. The reason that it is so much work now is that people write the text in word and does not use consistent markup.

[starrigger]

Originally Posted by tompe

The original problem was only generating eBooks. But the point was that by restricting your choices you can get something that works. You have to think about the whole chain. The reason that it is so much work now is that people write the text in word and does not use consistent markup.

Another reason is that there are a half dozen formats, all of which behave differently, even when fed pretty standardized text.

But my main point was that, for most writers, ebooks are still only a small part of the big picture, and they're not going to select their writing software based on what's going to make it easy to translate into ebooks. Nor should they have to.

By the time a manuscript gets into typeset format--and there's no guarantee, by the way, that it's going to be imported electronically at all--it may very well be keyboarded in from the paper ms.--I don't think there's very much left of the original Word formatting. The trick will be to get ebook formatting done at that stage as a normal part of the work flow. I'm hoping that by my next book, that will be a done deal.

[cerement]

Originally Posted by starrigger

By the time a manuscript gets into typeset format--and there's no guarantee, by the way, that it's going to be imported electronically at all--it may very well be keyboarded in from the paper ms.--

Well, it's definitely in electronic from from the typesetting point on (most often a manuscript and a template) unless you're dealing with an artisan printer still doing letterpress ...

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by starrigger

I'm sorry, but this is simply wrong, and that's one reason there's so much misunderstanding between the e-reading audience and the people putting out ebooks (or not putting out ebooks). Taking an author's digital file and turning it into a properly formatted ebook is NOT a matter of a few seconds, or even a few steps. It's a time-consuming process that involves inputting minute editing corrections, formatting changes, and going through a different conversion process for every one of those damn ebook formats, and then finding things that are screwed up in the process and fixing them.

Someday it'll be automated, and will seem as simple as you describe. It'll require the creation of ebook-formatted files to be incorporated into the typesetting process. But right now, it's not nearly that simple.

If it were, e-reads would have at least twice as many books out on the market instead of caught in a production backlog, and Tor would have had an ebook store running for months now.

And yeah, I think the multiple formats are part of the problem. Newcomers to ebooks don't want to worry about formats, they want to read books. And they certainly don't want to have to think about converting formats. It's just one more stupid obstacle to people adopting the technology.

It takes no more effort to format the authors digital file to an e-book format than to a print ready version and the expense of physically printing the book and distributing it is nonexistant with an e-book. Much of the two processes are duplicated. Your argument is pretty much invalid.

[kjk]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

It takes no more effort to format the authors digital file to an e-book format than to a print ready version and the expense of physically printing the book and distributing it is nonexistant with an e-book. Much of the two processes are duplicated. Your argument is pretty much invalid.

Given that Mr. Carver obviously has first hand experience with both formatting his digital files to an e-book format, and to a print ready format, and with the expense of having books printed, and distributed professionally, I'd say his argument is pretty much valid, from his viewpoint as a published author of both digital and printed books.

You may be seeing it from a different, and no less valid viewpoint, of course. I just wouldn't so blithely dismiss his arguments.

[JSWolf]

Well, the average novel is a simple format. That should be able to be setup to look good in a number of different formats fairly easily. There is no excuse these days from not starting with a good digital file that's not PDF or some half-assed scan/OCR.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by kjk

Given that Mr. Carver obviously has first hand experience with both formatting his digital files to an e-book format, and to a print ready format, and with the expense of having books printed, and distributed professionally, I'd say his argument is pretty much valid, from his viewpoint as a published author of both digital and printed books.

You may be seeing it from a different, and no less valid viewpoint, of course. I just wouldn't so blithely dismiss his arguments.

Well, I do have firsthand experience of formatting one of Jeffrey's novels into LRF using Bookdesigner. It wasn't too much of a hassle. The main problem was the source file. But once that's sorted, it's easy enough to deal with and that book needed more formatting then most novels.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by ssaxt0

I just went buy Walmart and saw $7.99 books selling for $5.97 so these are the overflow books from major bookstores that did not seel and Walmart is selling them for a profit.

Then why are some of those reduced books that have just been released?

[Lady Fitzgerald]

The old carriage makers that complained they couldn't compete with new fangled horseless carriage went out of business. The ones who started making horseless carriages and phased out the old buggies thrived.

[HamsterRage]

Originally Posted by starrigger

You could try that--although I'm skeptical of how successful you'd be. But there are reasons for manuscript format being different from book format. And that is that ms. format is easier to edit.

And before you say, well, do all the editing right in the digital file...I'd say, no thank you. I think most writers and editors would agree. And it's not just because the tools aren't up to the job. It's because you see a lot on the paper edit that you don't see on the screen. I can't explain it, except that it's just different. Things jump out at you that you'd miss otherwise. It's an important part of the editing process, for me at least.

Way back in time we programmers had these tools called "code generators". If I remember correctly they were generally associated with "4GL" languages that were going to eventually make all us programmers redundant.

Anyways, you'd inevitably find places that you'd goofed, and the generated code didn't quite do what you wanted. The second that you fiddled that generated code you were screwed. You could never go back to your original design tool to make enhancements and then re-generate. Because you'd loose your manual tweaks. So as much as possible, you did your tweaks in the design tool and then regenerated.

It seems to me this is the same thing. Convert your ms format to book format to proofread. Then fix the errors in the ms format and regenerate the book format. Rinse and repeat.

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

It takes no more effort to format the authors digital file to an e-book format than to a print ready version and the expense of physically printing the book and distributing it is nonexistant with an e-book. Much of the two processes are duplicated. Your argument is pretty much invalid.

You're right about the amount of effort involved to create an e-book format from the author's digital manuscript being no greater than the amount of effort required to create the print-ready master files.

The problem is that you can't produce a print copy from a digital master any more than you can produce an e-book directly from a print master. No more effort does not mean exactly the same effort.

If you want to argue that e-books should be somewhat cheaper than paper, I won't argue. There are real cost savings in e-books. However, that doesn't mean they should be drastically cheaper. Paper related costs are only $1-2 a book, so expecting e-books of current paperbacks to drop to less than $5 is probably wishful thinking. When it comes to hardcovers, you're dealing with a different pricing model anyway. Part of what you're paying for with a hardcover is getting it six months to a year before the paperback, and with the e-book of a hardcover you're getting that early access so it's going to cost more than a paperback.

It should be less than the hardcover, and the price should drop over time - but it should include something to cover that access.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

JSWolf may have hit the nail on the head when he said the main problem was the source file. Mayhap different formatting (as in templates) of the source would help. Much of the formatting that goes into preparing print and e-book editions are probably duplicated. Once the formatting is done for print editions, they still have to be "typeset", printed, bound, packaged for shipping, shipped, etc. Any that do not sell have to be destroyed and the covers returned for credit, adding the loss of the unsold books, packaging the covers for shipment, the added labor involved, etc. to the equation. All that enormously adds the cost of materials, labor, etc. to the cost of paperbooks that e-books don't have. Once an e-book has been formatted (which should be simpler than ready to print formatting since pagination isn't as great a concern, if at all)), it doesn't get printed, bound, packaged, shipped, handled by the retailers, and unsold copies returned, etc. Distribution can be much cheaper because computers handle the vast majority of the labor load, very, very little of which involves physical handling. The drain on natural resources is reduced to almost nothing.

I still feel much of the moaning and groaning by publishers comes from a reluctance to leave the familiarity of how things were done in the past and be willing to adopt new technology. There is a huge physical overhead infrastructure (printing presses, distribution network, etc.) that they feel would have to be written off. I feel that infrastructure can be phased out by not spending the money needed to maintain older parts of it and letting it gradually die off as demand for paper books dies off.

E-books just make more sense financially to everyone involved but will require a willingness from authors, publishers, retailers and consumers to adapt to the new technology. Most (if not all) of the objections I've seen so far are excuses to cover that reluctance to adopt new technology, excuses like an unneeded dependance on the old technology in place (get over it and move on), the need to have some physical in hand (get over that, too), etc. Sure the new technology has a lot of bugs to be worked out (which would be greatly expedited if retailers of the new technology would settle on one format and quit being so greedy, trying to force their own proprietary formats on us in an effort to monopolize the market) but it will happen. If this generation can't adapt, the newer ones coming up will (and have been).

[Duiker]

Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic

[*]The cost of investment in the technical infrastructure is similar to the cost of setting up a warehouse or a distribution system for printed books.

I couldn't bear to read any more after this line. It was so absurd I couldn't go on. I would love to see another publishers response to this. Would they feel obligated to agree?

[TallMomof2]

I am working on converting an image pdf that was created from screen captures to rtf for my husband. The original pdf is close to 200 pages. It took me 6 hours to prep the pdf for my OCR software because there were a lot of graphics that needed to be excluded. It took the OCR software about 45 minutes to process with me sitting there and making corrections when the software wasn't sure. So far I've spent 12 hours editing in Word and I still have several dozen errors to fix. The rtf file is 80+ pages. It also includes about a dozen graphic files that had to edited to view properly in the rtf.

That is an extreme example but I've spent 20 hours proofing google scans after they were OCRed so preparing a good digital file is not a trivial exercise. But I still don't see how anyone can say the costs of paperbook and digital book are the same. Once you get a good rtf it can be easily converted to any number of formats.