02-02-2009, 03:01 PM | #46 |
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I agree, except with the state everything is in, they might not be able to even buy a small scale ebook publisher, or at least they might not get the OK to. I can only hope though that small publishing houses will take the industry back where it needs to be- smaller advances (with bigger percentages), Print on Demand and more of a focus on ebooks. I doubt the big houses that aren't listening now will take notice until it is too late.
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02-02-2009, 03:02 PM | #47 | |
ZCD BombShel
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02-02-2009, 03:37 PM | #48 |
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Ah, this topic. I try not to wade into it too often, but it's been over a year so....
I'm actually one of those folks who generally agrees with the publishers that in the current publishing climate eBook prices from major publishers are not way out of line. There are a lot of title costs involved in producing a salable ebook - some fixed, some marginal and some opportunity costs - and generally a fairly low first year sales run over which to capitalize these costs. Believe me, it can cost a couple of thousand dollars to convert even an electronic final copy manuscript into salable, professional (ie DRM) eBooks, and that's for titles that may only sell a few hundred copies. The figures become far more positive when the eBook-to-pBook ratio favors eBooks, and downright delightful for eBook only publishing where one does not have to maintain both a physical and electronic delivery channel. That said, this particular publisher goes a little off the deep end. If the industry weren't so paranoid about disclosing figures, he could probably have made a better case by laying out the actual costs, rather than exaggerating for effect. |
02-02-2009, 03:49 PM | #49 |
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Concerning the views of Mr. Michael Justus (CEO…) I have just one line for him: “you poor thing…”
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02-02-2009, 03:51 PM | #50 |
Publishers are evil!
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When publishers sell books to bookstores they allow the bookstore to return the unsold portion of books, which are often then destroyed. So a bookstore can order 100 books, sell 50, and then return 50, which are destroyed. This means that if you bought one of these books then in reality you paid for both the book you read and the one that was destroyed. This practice shouldn't apply to ebooks, so ebooks should be cheaper.
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02-02-2009, 03:55 PM | #51 | |
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02-02-2009, 03:56 PM | #52 |
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02-02-2009, 04:10 PM | #53 |
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Well... There's a point... They are supporting ebooks but continue to support pBooks, so eBooks are really an extra expenditure. An extra expense that will possibilitate their clients to get the products for a lower price.
An exclusive ebook store should have lower prices. But mantaining both paper and electronic book industry might be really not very appealing in this initial stage... |
02-02-2009, 04:23 PM | #54 |
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02-02-2009, 04:29 PM | #55 |
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From the interview it seems they are actually afraid of e-books becoming a success...
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02-02-2009, 04:54 PM | #56 | |
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I have a strong hunch that the only way this thinking is going to change is when the "old guard" running most of the publishing industry retires and a tech-savvy "new guard" takes over... Provided the old guard hasn't terminally infected the new guard with their toxic meme of a business model. |
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02-02-2009, 05:48 PM | #57 |
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Umm, Mr. Publisher Dude? That part about costs for e-media being similar to published books??
Well, see, here's the problem. The "e" in ebook stands for "electronic", otherwise known as technology. The thing is, many early adopters of ebooks are techies, you know, people who work with computers, build them, program them, etc. Most of them know what it takes to convert a Word document to an ebook file. Consequently, most of them think you're pretty stupid. We know there are cost for converting to an electronic format. But it's a one-time conversion cost. After the up-front investment, ebooks can save us a lot of money.... and make you a lot more as well. If you were smart, you could see that... but then, your article shows how smart you aren't. |
02-02-2009, 06:05 PM | #58 | |
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In short, by being worried about 'piracy' of ebooks, and insisting on DRM 'solutions', they have wasted an enormous amount of capital up-front, and are wasting large amounts of money on an ongoing basis.
Sigh... The music industry has finally wised up, after having their arms twisted by Apple to do away with DRM on music over the past six or seven years. Amazon seem to be entirely uninterested in twisting publishers arms over DRM, and publishers seem to be too stupid to discard it on their own at the moment. Perhaps in another five years, publishers will finally wake up to what a disaster DRM is for the ebook industry, and since that's the long-term future of publishing, for them too. It took Apple only five years to go from selling 25 million songs in 2003 to selling over 1 billion songs in just the last half of 2008 -- and one eighth of all music sold in the US. Also, consider that Apple pass on around 70% of the price of the music sold to the music publishers. Amazon passes on just 35%, although that is of the list, not actual sale price. I suspect publishers would be a lot happier with 70% of actual sale price! Quote:
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02-02-2009, 06:35 PM | #59 | |
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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. |
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02-02-2009, 06:52 PM | #60 | |
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