08-14-2008, 04:07 AM | #46 |
wdejager
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A publisher's point of view
Being a publisher at a relatively small academic publishing house, I follow this discussion with great interest. Please let me share my view with you:
One can't stop the future from happening True. That's why I'm here, reading this thread and reacting on this discussion But to be serious, we acknowledge the importance of electronic reading, hence we set up a online store for ebook hardware. This way we get in touch with tomorrow's readers, which allows us to adapt our strategic focus when it comes down to our core business, publishing. Loss of income The real question is, will publishers still be able to add enough value to a publication in the future? Many academic authors are perfectly able to create a book or an article themselves. They can even hire proofreaders or editors through the internet. Except for the recognized name of the publisher, its logo, marketing services and quality control, what reasons would there be for an author to turn to a traditional publisher, even if they offer electronic publishing as well? Publishers will be facing loss of income anyway, even if they do offer electronic publishing facilities. Loosing ground for competitors True; if the competitors do offer the publications the customers are looking for; but if the publisher doesn't offer electronic versions of it's books at all, nobody can offer the ebook in the first place, so there still can't be any real competition in that case. Piracy True. I think that book scanning will become a nightmare for publishers and book retailers. You can already see the rise of torrents sites offering pdf files of textbooks for example. With a new generation of ebook hardware coming up that offer A4 sized displays, some people might be very tempted to download scanned documents and read them on this kind of ereaders. Ebooks is cheaper to produce Not completely true. Even without the costs for printing, you still have costs for editing, proofreading, designing, marketing et cetera. Most of the time, the smaller part of the costs for realizing a new publication are printing costs. An additional problem is that there is not one ebook standard (which leads to costly conversion problems) and that you have to upload one ebook to many channels, conforming to different standards, and keeping track of ebook sales through many channels, not even mentioning the amount of work to calculate the royalty's for the author when serving many different channels. Ebooks reach a bigger market Of course ebooks can be very interesting for people with reading disabilities. But, I doubt if this could be a reason to step into the ebook market from a commercial point of view. Of course, it could create a group of very loyal customers and it would be an ethical step to offer ebooks in this regard. Ebooks are also easier to distribute all over the world True, especially looking at Amazon's Kindle and the iPhone 3G, with 'always on' internet connections. It's really fantastic. But keep in mind, that the different screen sizes do offer problems (see my pdf 'statement' below). Decreased production costs can result in cheaper ebooks Of course ebooks can be cheaper, but please refer to my explanation above why I think that ebooks will not become really cheaper at all. The question is whether the book's selling price really influences buying behaviour. Of course it will, but Dutch research has shown that price differences (within certain margins of course) doesn't really stop or encourage people from buying books. You can read just one book at a time (ok, there are exceptions...), so I wouldn't not be so sure that a lower price makes people buy more (e)books. Marketing possibilities Absolutely, it becomes much easier to distribute samples or even free versions of the book. But in the other hand, this argument is also valid for print books, of which online excerpts are available (view inside the book programs). --- Additionally, please let me underline that most of the time, it's the authors that don't want us to make their book available in electronic form. They fear that it will be illegaly copied or that others can somehow alter their texts. Of course it takes time and we show ebook readers to our authors to convince them, but it's still very difficult. Besides, some of our publications took many months of writing and designing, you can't just convert those kind of graphic-rich publications into an ebook with the push of a button. It would really help if there would be better conversion utilities (like mobipocket's conversion tools), but then for professional use. Until then, pdf is in my point of view the only succesful ebook standard; everybody knows and uses it, both readers and designers/publishers, it has become an iso standard lately, and there is a broad range of software for creating and reading pdf documents available. Last edited by ebookreaders; 08-14-2008 at 04:55 AM. Reason: small improvements |
08-14-2008, 04:45 AM | #47 | |
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08-14-2008, 04:53 AM | #48 | ||||||
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I really hope that you will try to convince other publishers as well as authors to release more academic titles. By the way; do you happen to have some kind of contact with Springer Link? Last edited by Gianfranco; 08-14-2008 at 05:00 AM. Reason: An error |
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08-14-2008, 05:52 AM | #49 | |
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08-14-2008, 06:47 AM | #50 | |||||
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08-14-2008, 06:51 AM | #51 | |
wdejager
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I agree that lower production costs should be reflected in the selling price of an ebook, but unfortunately, many publishers are still convinced that a small market (for ebooks) automatically means that the ebooks should be relatively expensive, in order to get enough revenue to make their business 'sustainable'. |
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08-14-2008, 07:12 AM | #52 | |||
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Are you considering contacting them? They have a lot of books which look very interesting. Last edited by Gianfranco; 08-14-2008 at 07:13 AM. Reason: An error |
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08-14-2008, 07:23 AM | #53 | |
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08-14-2008, 07:42 AM | #54 | |
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And to produce and read ebooks you need computers. Besides the resources you have to pour into manufacturing them, computers need power. Electric power and lots of it, which comes from a number of sources, but burning fossil fuels is still very popular. Ebook readers themselves need (far less) power, but if they become extremely popular... It is an interesting discussion topic, but I do not think it is as one-dimensional as you propose. |
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08-14-2008, 07:51 AM | #55 | |
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Last edited by Gianfranco; 08-14-2008 at 07:54 AM. Reason: An Error |
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08-14-2008, 07:56 AM | #56 | |
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I'm also not sure what you mean by "material which is only used once" - are you referring to the books themselves? But do you know the costs of keeping the underlying infrastructure of the internet going? All those routers, servers, and so on? There has been some research into it (PDF link): The total power demand in 2005 (including associated infrastructure) is equivalent (in capacity terms) to about five 1000 MW power plants for the U.S. and 14 such plants for the world. The total electricity bill for operating those servers and associated infrastructure in 2005 was about $2.7 B and $7.2 B for the U.S. and the world, respectively. Another article: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070215-8854.html With all this I'm just trying to say that electronic distribution ALSO comes with a price tag. It would be interesting to compare the two. Last edited by acidzebra; 08-14-2008 at 08:02 AM. |
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08-14-2008, 08:05 AM | #57 |
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Of course, the whole issue of energy usage is quite interesting in itself. And there is lots of room for discussion.
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08-14-2008, 10:05 AM | #58 | ||||
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hello ebookreaders and welcome. it's great to see a publisher taking an interest in ebooks and participating in the discussion.
you raise some interesting points and i imagine that similar concerns are probably held by many publishers. i hope you'll take the time to look around this site and read some of the different threads ; many of these topics have been discussed here and you might find some interesting perspectives or new technical information. i really applaud your openness to ereading. i'm sure that it will help you to gain a loyal customer base. i would definitely encourage you to take a closer look at the EPUB format which is the emerging standard for ebooks. it is much more powerful than any current format and will resolve many of the layout problems publishers currently face. pdf is not a format adapted to ebooks because it is fundamentally print-oriented ; it is very difficult to use pdf on small portable reading devices and while there may be a market for A4 format readers i think many people prefer a smaller device which can easily be carried in a purse or pocket. some of the advantages of EPUB have been discussed earlier in this thread and you can easily find more. but i would like to specifically address some of the points you raise in relation to epub. you mentioned the problem of no standard format, which makes producing ebooks very complicated for publishers. you are absolutely right and this "e-babel" of incompatible, competing formats is perhaps the biggest challenge facing ebooks currently. epub will help to put an end to this, since not only is it designed to be an industry standard, but it can also be easily converted to other formats if there is a need. of course publishers will need to put the tools for production into place, which will take some time, effort, and financial investment on their part. however once they are in place, they can become an almost invisible part of the workflow, requiring no significant increase in production cost, effort or time. epub can already be generated using many tools and more will come. if you use InDesign, it can be exported directly as part of the book layout workflow. it will allow much greater control over the appearance of the book than any existing format, including true footnotes, true table of contents, proper pagination, and of course all text formatting, which addresses another of your concerns. the support for SVG (vector) image format will also simplify convertion of graphic-rich books. the main drawback encountered in this area is the smaller size of many reading devices, which can make it difficult to present complex graphs or charts. Quote:
in addition, authors who have addressed the topic have found that illegal ebooks have a trivial impact (if any) on their sales of legitimate copies, and can in fact be an advantage since they allow new readers to discover their work ; new readers who quite likely will purchase more books, if they like what they read. Quote:
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all of your points are interesting and worth discussing and i would certainly like to respond to each of them but i think i have written a long enough saga for one post !!! i do hope you'll stay to continue the discussion, and take a look in some of the other threads which address your concerns. |
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08-14-2008, 04:11 PM | #59 |
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I have now added a norwegian version of the letter as an attachment.
If you have a translation of the letter in another language, give me the link or a text file and I will add it :-) And btw, pheeeww.. I'm happy I've finished this off now. I've spent some hours on this letter. Last edited by haridasi; 08-14-2008 at 04:14 PM. |
08-14-2008, 04:17 PM | #60 |
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Regarding the resources used in paper production, it should not be overlooked that not only are large quantities of electricity required in running a paper production plant, but that there are enormous quantities of water-based chemicals used in the processing of most paper products. Most of these chemicals are toxic, many of them are non-bio-degradable, and most of them are just dumped back into the local water sources after use, making them a significant source of water pollution.
When you combine all of that with the production of one e-book reader, which is capable of replacing potentially hundreds to even thousands of books, the economy of scale and conservation of resources tips very strongly in favor of e-books. |
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