How much cost difference is there really?

[emellaich]

Finally, there is the increased flexibility of ebooks.

That $1 per book figure assumes that we print exactly the correct amount of books. If we print twice as many books as we sell, the actual printing cost is $2 per book sold. I would assume that in most cases you have some amount of books left over, so the actual printing cost per book sold will be above $1.

Even if you sell out there is an issue. Let's assume that you never print in quantities lower than 5,000 for economic batch reasons. You print a run of 5,000 and you sell out. You could have actually sold 6,000, but since you didn't print that many initially, its too expensive to go back for an over-run of 1,000. As a result you lost 1,000 in sales. If this had been an ebook, you would have captured all of those lost sales since you wouldn't really run out. Therefore, you could have either made more profit, or you could have charged less per book and still hit your profit target. Of course the lower charge per book would increase the sales further and have increased your profit likewise.

The fact that you don't have to pre-determine the sales amount gives you enormous flexibility.

In fact, I wonder if there isn't a possibility for publishers to create new imprints in this new world. Just like there are 'low-cost' airlines, I wonder if there can be low-cost publishing options. Let's say you are a big publisher and you find a book that you think will sell, just not to your 5,000 unit minimum. You shift it over to your low cost imprint. For this imprint, you do minimal editing. You basically accept a one-pass editing model. You have a generic cover that is used by all books of the imprint -- no custom art. The cover has a slot for a title and an author or two. No book-specific promotion. You might promote the brand/imprint itself, but not the book or author. Electronic, of course so that there is no $5,000 print run. You either sell it direct from your web site, or direct to a retailer web site with no middleman cut of the sales. This (and other cost-savings moves) let you have a smaller break-even point. The buyer knows they are getting a step above self-published: a professionally selected book with some editing, but doesn't expect all of the polish of a major label. Prices are a bit cheaper and volumes are likewise smaller. However, the branding of the new imprint should bring higher sales than your typical self-published novel.

[b0ned0me]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

Every single pirated ebook I've seen has been OCR'ed. You can always tell by the way some words or letters are just out of place. Just kinda kills the reading experience, when you have to figure out what is being said all the time.

I'd just like to point out that just last week I purchased a couple of fully legit ebooks that had horribly, glaringly obvious OCR errors in them that would have been caught by even the most cursory spellcheck (nice work, Baen/Webscription!). Nothing to prove that those pirate books didn't start out with a tasty DRM wrapping and nutritious OCR-error filling straight from the publisher.

[Hellmark]

Originally Posted by b0ned0me

I'd just like to point out that just last week I purchased a couple of fully legit ebooks that had horribly, glaringly obvious OCR errors in them that would have been caught by even the most cursory spellcheck (nice work, Baen/Webscription!). Nothing to prove that those pirate books didn't start out with a tasty DRM wrapping and nutritious OCR-error filling straight from the publisher.

Yeah, that's true. I was looking at a book the other day in google books, and it had some pretty big issues.

[pdurrant]

If you report such errors to mailto:abailey@webwrights.com -- with specifics -- they will get fixed.

Originally Posted by b0ned0me

I'd just like to point out that just last week I purchased a couple of fully legit ebooks that had horribly, glaringly obvious OCR errors in them that would have been caught by even the most cursory spellcheck (nice work, Baen/Webscription!). Nothing to prove that those pirate books didn't start out with a tasty DRM wrapping and nutritious OCR-error filling straight from the publisher.

[Gwaihir]

Originally Posted by Morlac

We use InDesign. Our editors have some leeway on whether or how much they want to edit the original manuscript file (usually in Word). For some books where there's not going to be a lot of restructuring in layout (multiple columns, graphics, etc) a manuscript edit makes more sense. Since, however, a big part of preparing a book for us is getting the various elements to layout and fit properly, it's unavoidable that most of the editing has to be done in layout after the book has been poured into InDesign.

And herein, IMHO, lies the main catch: for paper books, there's folk that make sure ever letter ends up exactly where they want it: no pages with only a single line on it, no headings just a few lines of the bottom of a page, etc. The layout is their job.

Sure, you can tell even Word that you don't want such single lines on a page, etc., but does anyone ever use those features? Would a professional layout specialist even come near such a way of processing? Nope.. he'd toss it into a page-fixed format immediately.

On the internet we have HTML, a format that like epub is meant to reflow to the size of the screen (or window). However, go around the net and you'll find that most sites have fixed the width of their canvas to something of their liking. Folks with a larger screen get empty margings, folks with a smaller screen are screwed. Why? Because the layout folk want their pixel perfect exact control and refuse to do reflowing stuff. It's a big "screw the new medium, we do what we've done for 100+ years". That's how strong that dogma is. Will it be broken by the ever growing variety of screen sizes (from iPhone through netbook through ever bigger desktop screens)? Doesn't look that way yet.

Ebooks are facing that same problem now. Will layout be defined fully semantically at last? I'd hope so, but it will no doubt take many years still and a complete rethinking of the profession.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Gwaihir

Sure, you can tell even Word that you don't want such single lines on a page, etc., but does anyone ever use those features?

Word's default settings include widow & orphan control. (It's not great widow/orphan control, but it's better than nothing.)