People who want no DRM are impractical dreamers...

[HamsterRage]

Originally Posted by elcreative

Have to disagree with your estimate on re-reading but that could just be my entire circle of reading friends and thus anecdotal but certainly lower than 95% new to them.

But 100 books a year may make you an above average reader but wouldn't qualify as avid by my (and my friends') standards... that comes in more like 50-75 per quarter... and most of those are new purchases, many in hardback...

From what I've seen, taking the whole population into account, an "average" reader would be about 2 books a year. The percentage of the population that reads more than 1 book a month is probably down around the 20% mark. I'm not going go anywhere near qualifying "avid" with whether or not the books are new, used, borrowed or re-reads, or hardcover or soft cover.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Then I am asking you, what would happen to their pbook business? They would also have to sell those for extremely low amounts (or nobody would buy them) -- and they would all go out of business. Sounds great for users, but publishers and book sellers could not operate this way.

Why couldn't they?

Let's say a company makes a profit of $1 when they sell a pbook for $10, and also makes a profit of $1 when they sell an ebook for $5. How is there a difference, from their bottom line's point of view, if they're making that money selling ebooks or pbooks?

The only reason it would be necessary to sell pbooks as cheaply as ebooks is if they were in competition, but they're not. They're two different market segments, just like the different formats of pbooks. Hardcovers don't sell for the same price as trade paperbacks, and trade paperbacks don't sell for the same price as mass-market paperbacks, either.

And so what if they sell more cheap ebooks (earning, remember, the same profit per unit) than they do more expensive pbooks? Why is it necessary for that company to sell pbooks when their customers clearly want to buy ebooks? If ebook sales are cannibalizing pbook sales, then the customers are there for ebooks, and a smart business knows that they should be selling what their customers want to buy. Let's say that every one of their customers decides to buy only ebooks ... if the company is earning the same profit per unit, it makes absolutely no difference in terms of their accounting.

The costs incurred to make one additional unit is totally irrelevant for the pricing of digital goods.

Why would this be? There seem to be a lot of companies that disagree with you. They price their digital goods much like they price their physical goods. You're saying they shouldn't?

Besides, why should we care about costs, what matters is how much are we willing to pay and is anyone willing to sell at that price.

Because, not being utter schmucks, we don't want to destroy the book industry (despite what some shills claim) and we don't want to demand books cheaper than they can be produced. But, being normal, ordinary customers, we also look at something and say "hey, this is just some fizzy water and some flavoring, why are you charging me so much for it?"

For the publisher the point is, total sales volume has to be high enough to cover development, production, distribution costs AND to make a reasonable profit. Even for ebooks there are distribution costs such as advertising.

Advertising isn't a distribution cost; it's a marketing cost. It's in the same category as little cardboard racks to display books in, not trucks to deliver them to stores.

For a pbook, costs include editing, printing, warehousing, shipping, advertising, distributor discounts, retailer discounts, and returns.

For an ebook sold through Amazon, costs include editing, advertising, and "agent" commission.

Printing, warehousing, shipping, two (at least) layers of discounts, and especially returns, are not trivial expenses.

Just starting with the discounts, for instance, in a related industry I was lucky to get 40% of my retail price on items sold to distributors; I've heard that book publishers get less, around 30%. But let's say it's 40%. So right there, if a publisher sells a box of pbooks to Ingram for $100, they make $40. If that same publisher sells the same value (at whatever price) of ebooks through Amazon, they make $70.

Then there are printing, warehousing, and shipping (often shipping twice, when the returns come back). There are two issues with these: First, of course, is the actual expense. You have to buy paper, buy ink, buy equipment, pay employees, to make all those paper books. Then you have to pay truck drivers and boat crews (and all the people who drive forklifts, etc.) to haul them from place to place. You have to rent a space to store the ones that aren't in the stores right now, and you have to pay taxes on those cartons of books that are in your warehouse. But what may be even more important to publishers is guessing how many books they will need, and printing accordingly. Guess too low, and you've got a runaway bestseller that nobody can buy until you print more books ... and by then (there's a fair bit of lag time involved, especially if you're printing overseas) a lot of prospective buyers have found something else to do with their money, probably involving your competitors. Guess too high, and you've printed a million copies of a book that nobody wants. And not only do you have those million books that ate your capital in manufacturing, you still have to pay for lugging them around, storing them, and finally packing them all in boxes and sending them to the paper recycler for pennies on your printing dollar.

Ebooks have none of those expenses. They don't cost anything to print. They don't cost anything to stock. They don't cost anything to deliver. And you have exactly as many of them as you need -- no more to be remaindered, no fewer to leave your customers bookless. The only expenses they do have are those of editing (which, from the quality we've seen lately, doesn't seem to be very much), resale (30%, we know what that one is), and advertising (again, highly variable, and seemingly decreasing on the part of publishers for any format; aside from listings in trade publications, it seems to this reader that few except selected "big names" are advertised at all). And in exchange, they don't have returns. The impact of returns can be staggering -- a publisher has to pay, once again, for half of the books they sent out to come back. They've paid all the production and distribution costs for books that are going to the recycler, not the buyer. That's not an issue with ebooks.

We can go on and on about "ebooks cost virtually nothing to make", what does it matter if nobody is willing to sell them for next to nothing?

Well, we could roll over and be docile little consumers, saying "thank you sir, may I have another?" when they do things that are bad for us, but that's not the kind of people the folks here are. For one thing, it's a matter of educating our fellow readers. Nothing personal here, but you're an example: you think the cost to a publisher of an ebook and a pbook are very similar. The more people who understand, the better educated the customers are, the more likely the publishers are to do things which are in our own best interests. It matters because producers sell items for prices consumers are willing to pay, so if we explain things to counter the publishers' misinformation, those consumers will say "hey, sell us cheap ebooks" and the publishers might, potentially, think "damn, they're just not going for this line we've been feeding them, and we can't make 10x the profit on an ebook we do on a pbook; I guess we'll just have to settle for the same profits we've been getting, and sell them cheaper books" ... and then we can afford to buy more books!

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Then I am asking you, what would happen to their pbook business? They would also have to sell those for extremely low amounts (or nobody would buy them) -- and they would all go out of business. Sounds great for users, but publishers and book sellers could not operate this way.

Such low prices can only work for a self publishing author with sales on the web only.

The publishers who have released info about it have all said that low ebook prices & promos increase their print sales, or at least not hurt them. (O'Reilly print sales have been dropping, as many publishers have--but their ebook sales have been increasing faster than print has been dropping. They haven't been losing 1 print sale per ebook sale.)

Baen went from a small paperback-focused science fiction publisher to a hardcover-and-paperback bestseller producing publisher after they started giving away substantial numbers of ebooks.

Besides, why should we care about costs, what matters is how much are we willing to pay and is anyone willing to sell at that price. For the publisher the point is, total sales volume has to be high enough to cover development, production, distribution costs AND to make a reasonable profit. Even for ebooks there are distribution costs such as advertising.

For ebooks, *all* that matters to cover those costs is sales volume. They could price all ebooks at $1, and if there's enough volume, that would cover costs. (It'd take too many; it's not worth doing.) For pbooks, there's a price below which someone (the store, the distributor, or the publisher) doesn't make a profit on that title; that price is "production costs + a bit for overhead."

Ebooks don't have that limitation; publishers should be bouncing the prices all over trying to find the sweet spot that maximizes sales & profits. But some publishers aren't treating ebooks as a new market, a chance to reach people who were never going to buy new hardcovers. They're treating it as cannibalization of their current market, and fighting to keep it from growing.

We can go on and on about "ebooks cost virtually nothing to make", what does it matter if nobody is willing to sell them for next to nothing?

But some people are. How will it affect the Big Six publishers in the long run if their competition is selling ebooks at half or a quarter of their prices?

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Why? The ebook doesn't cost a couple of dollars to produce and ship. Handing one to me doesn't prevent them from handing one to you. Why should just-under-paperback cost be the price, considering it costs substantially less than the paperback to produce?

You are talking as if all the costs involved in producing a book should be borne by the paper version, and the e-book is an add-on that costs practically nothing and should be priced accordingly. This is not realistic.

[queentess]

Originally Posted by Catlady

You are talking as if all the costs involved in producing a book should be borne by the paper version, and the e-book is an add-on that costs practically nothing and should be priced accordingly. This is not realistic.

The ebook should bear costs of the writing, editing, etc, but should not bear the physical costs such as shipping, storage, returns, etc. And while the publisher is under no obligation to lower the price accordingly, many people have a hard time understanding why they should have to pay more for a product that obviously costs less to produce.

Sure, price doesn't have to reflect the cost that goes into making an item, but treating consumers like they're stupid and can't figure it out is not necessarily the right path to take either.

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

The only reason it would be necessary to sell pbooks as cheaply as ebooks is if they were in competition, but they're not. They're two different market segments, just like the different formats of pbooks. Hardcovers don't sell for the same price as trade paperbacks, and trade paperbacks don't sell for the same price as mass-market paperbacks, either.

How can you say they're not in competition?

Hardcover books traditionally are published first, with paperbacks coming out about a year later. Sometimes a trade paperback precedes a mass-market paperback. The consumer is mostly paying for the privilege of reading a book early.

The only books I've ever seen that have been issued in hardcover and paperback at the same time are some reference-type books.

Hardcovers initially have the market to themselves--they are not competing with the cheaper versions. But now you throw e-books into the mix, and want them to come out at the same time as hardcovers, and at a significantly cheaper price. Of course they're competing, and the more mainstream e-books become, the more significant that competition becomes.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by stonetools

Here's what you supposedly proved:


Here's my initial question:



How can I put this:

THE ANSWER YOU GAVE DOES NOT ANSWER MY QUESTION.

Not only you and Kai Lung can raise your voices

Writers and publishers are doing their very best to screw to customers. They'll make a better living if they stropped that. We have the Agency 6 and I do not see authors clamoring for the agency model to go away.

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by queentess

The ebook should bear costs of the writing, editing, etc, but should not bear the physical costs such as shipping, storage, returns, etc. And while the publisher is under no obligation to lower the price accordingly, many people have a hard time understanding why they should have to pay more for a product that obviously costs less to produce.

Sure, price doesn't have to reflect the cost that goes into making an item, but treating consumers like they're stupid and can't figure it out is not necessarily the right path to take either.

But the idea that one should pay a dollar or two is absurd. And the e-book prices are lower than the comparable hardcover prices. The only time they're not, as far as I can tell, is when stores deeply discount the paper books.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

I put "download girl with dragon tattoo" into a Google search box and got a torrent site as the first hit - and another illegitimate site as the third.

It really is that easy.

I got the same results as Stonetools. So did you also use the word torrent in your search?

[EowynCarter]

but should not bear the physical costs such as shipping, storage, returns, etc.

It bears however, server cost, developers for the website, server admins, license for DRM, tech support, support because of DRM crapp, people to make the e-book (It DO take some time if you want to do it properly)

[Cyberman tM]

Originally Posted by Catlady

But now you throw e-books into the mix, and want them to come out at the same time as hardcovers, and at a significantly cheaper price. Of course they're competing, and the more mainstream e-books become, the more significant that competition becomes.

If the competition becomes too strong, maybe you're doing it wrong.

Much as it hurts, every few centuries traditions HAVE to be reworked.

Why rest everything on the hardcover? Perhaps in the new age the eBook will be the primary revenue-stream, with hardcover and paperbacks only bought afterwards, to have something physical. I still buy CDs, even though I could download them all.

---

About google: keep in mind that depending on where you are the result could vary! Google is not completely neutral - they filter/correct the results depending where you live.
(They have to - not everything is legal everywhere. They probably also factor guesstimates of preferences into it as well.)

[queentess]

Originally Posted by Catlady

But the idea that one should pay a dollar or two is absurd. And the e-book prices are lower than the comparable hardcover prices. The only time they're not, as far as I can tell, is when stores deeply discount the paper books.

But see, retailers aren't allowed to discount ebooks. Why would I pay $16 for the hardcover (which I can promptly resell) or $13 for the ebook with DRM? I agree, $1-2 is likely too little. But expecting me to pay hardback prices for an ebook is extreme. How about a $10 ebook for a paperback that was published in 1992? Maybe $15 is more your cup of tea? Or maybe have to wait 3 months after the hardback is released, then pay $13? These are 3 examples of books I wanted to purchase and didn't due to price.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I got the same results as Stonetools. So did you also use the word torrent in your search?

Usually including the word "ebook" or "download" is enough. If I Google "girl with the dragon tattoo ebook" I get 3 illegal hits on the first page of results.

[queentess]

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

It bears however, server cost, developers for the website, server admins, license for DRM, tech support, support because of DRM crapp, people to make the e-book (It DO take some time if you want to do it properly)

Much of that is paid for by the retailer (Amazon, B&N, whoever), and I shouldn't foot the cost for DRM or DRM support. The e-book will certainly take some formatting/layout, but it's minimal considering it should come from a file that is already proofed for the pbook (the proofing cost, of course, should apply to both types of books).

[stonetools]

One mo' time...

Some arguments against DRM that I think don't work:

1. "I bought this ebook, I own it, I should be able to do what I want with it". Er, no you didn't. I know making this observation is about as welcome as a turd in a swimming pool, but according to the law, when you "bought" an ebook, you did not receive an absolute transfer of -title in an object in exchange of money: rather, you bought a license to access a copy of the digital file.Now you can argue that the license should not include DRM. You can and should argue that the price for the license should be much lower than the sale price of a pbook. What you cannot do is argue into a court of law and insist that
DRM is an unlawful restriction of your ownership rights. Well you can ,but you will likely be disappointed.

2."The music industry still exists, so that proves that casual sharing and piracy had no effect on the music industry and maybe even helped it. Look at the success of ITunes when they shifted to non-DRM."
The music industry-, including musicians, believe that they have been severely hurt . The revenues from the music industry fell 50% since the 1990s when casual sharing/piracy of music files became widespread.Even the paper that argues that filesharing isn't the sole reason forthe fall revenue agrees that file sharing contributed to at least 20
per cent of the decline-a substantial percentage.

3." The use of DRM treats the buyer of ebooks like a criminal". I'm sorry but this is horse#### (to put it delicately).Storeowners have every right to take precautions to protect their goods. When the goods are valuable and easily stolen, they have a right to take even greater precautions. Maybe there is a jewelry store somewhere that displays its most expensive products in open shelves, is noncholant about patrons handling their merchandise, and has an attitude of total trust to anyone who enters their stores. Most jewelry stores don't , and we understand why they don't.
We don't even have to consider jewelry stores. Think of the B&N store in downtown DC. To enter the store, I walk past a metal detecter and a security guard . The items in the store have RFID tags on the them, which alarm if I try to take the items out of the store without paying for them. Do I feel offended by all this? Do I clutch my pearls and moan that I am being treated like a potential criminal and I deserve the trust of the storeowner? No, and I don't know anyone who does.
THe attitude of the digerati appears to be that publishers and boooksellers can take whatever precautions they like to protect their goods against theft, but no right to take measures to prevent the theft of ebooks, unless such measures (A) work perfectly (B) never inconvenience the digerati. Not suprisingly, the powers that be in the book industry are mostly unconvinced.
Now what could convince the PTB? Some ideas:
A. Some big time author puts his book out there without DRM and it becomes a best seller without large scale casualsharing/piracy.
B. Lots of regular folk become incensed about DRM and stop buyiing books as a result. Right now, they're buying DRMED ebooks hand over fist, and seem OK with DRM .
C. Some major retail channel (maybe Apple once again?) goes non DRM. (Apple could afford to do so, but what's the business case for them to do so? Dunno).

If you can think of some other ways, suggest them. The purist arguments (publishers ashould give up on DRM, because its somehow morally wrong or its against publishers' long term intersts in ways that that the publishers can't measure) aren't convincing.

On to 500!

[Freeshadow]

Originally Posted by stonetools

"I bought this ebook, I own it, I should be able to do what I want

with it". Er, no you didn't. I know making this observation is about as

welcome as a turd in a swimming pool, but according to the law, when

you "bought" an ebook, you did not receive an absolute transfer of

title in an object in exchange of money: rather, you bought a license

to access a copy of the digital file.

well there are actually media sellers that sell you a copy of the file.
and this is what I want.

all those who want to just lease and call it a sale are free to go elsewhere with their crap. In this case I'll go and buy the cheapest pboook (preferably used - no money for them) and make an ebook I own.
and its not according to the law but depends on the ebookshops terms of use -these are no laws.