Cheaper e-books will kill us, says publisher

[ficbot]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

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.

I feel like this is exactly the problem, and so far nobody has been able to convince me it isn't. The times an author or publisher has commented at Teleread, it's all about how there are costs we don't realize because X is done Y way, and nobody has ever talked about what if X was done Z way instead

Meanwhile, they will 'this is how it's done' themselves into oblivion if they don't get with the program. They have the perfect right to say 'we think books should cost X' but if the customer thinks that is too high, they will buy fewer (or no) books. You have to either adapt for what they want, or have them go elsewhere. In that sense, the book business is like every other.

[JSWolf]

I don't get why publishers feel that PDF is a good digital format to start with to use to make all the other eBook versions. I look at some ePub and I easily see that it's come from PDF and most have stupid errors throughout.

I am currently reading Living Dead in Dallas and I see the following at the top of the CSS for the ePub.

/* Textcafe version pdf2xml_2.0s54, */
/* A technology developed by Texterity, Inc - www.texterity.com */

And most the italics have have a missing space before or after. This is what I call a stupid error due to converting from PDF. PDF is not a good idea to use to convert from. I've never seen or read about any way to convert a novel length PDF to anything else without errors being introduced.

There is a digital copy of the book someplace that's not PDF. I don't see why the publishers don't take this (mostly in Word) and use it to generate the eBooks? It would be a lot easier and a lot less errors. Heck, if they used a good digital copy of the final copy, then the eBooks would have no more errors then the print versions.

[stargazertony]

Well, there are many publishers who do make a profit by selling e-books. They do it every day. If publishers can't compete then they should go out of business. No one owes them a living. When I took college economics, they always used buggy whips as an example of an industry that wouldn't change and mostly went out of business.

[abookreader]

Exactly stargazertony. Thank you.
I'm growing really tired of all the drama in the publishing industry.

If Macmillan (just to pick one at random) gets "killed" by eBooks or digital readers or anything else, it will be because they are not delivering a product that their customers want at a price their customers are willing to pay as well as their new competitor.

If somebody else starts writing humorous chick lit and selling it for $4 less than what you're selling a Stephanie Plum novel ... and your customers leave you for greener pastures, then it is because they've decided they prefer the new stuff at better prices. That is just the way it is. Find a way to do what they're doing, or die.

There is no Right to Live when it comes to business.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by 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.

This is not exactly a good example of how to make an e-book. At some point, pretty much all books printed in the last 20 or more years were a digital document, MS Word being a popular example (PDFs are too cumbersome to edit but do make a stable print ready document). It is much more efficient to format the digital file than to scan, run OCR, then edit scanning/OCR errors. Granted, the latter is often necessary for older, out of print books but the main focus here has been on newer books and they all will have a digital file to work with.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I don't get why publishers feel that PDF is a good digital format to start with to use to make all the other eBook versions. I look at some ePub and I easily see that it's come from PDF and most have stupid errors throughout.

I am currently reading Living Dead in Dallas and I see the following at the top of the CSS for the ePub.



And most the italics have have a missing space before or after. This is what I call a stupid error due to converting from PDF. PDF is not a good idea to use to convert from. I've never seen or read about any way to convert a novel length PDF to anything else without errors being introduced.

There is a digital copy of the book someplace that's not PDF. I don't see why the publishers don't take this (mostly in Word) and use it to generate the eBooks? It would be a lot easier and a lot less errors. Heck, if they used a good digital copy of the final copy, then the eBooks would have no more errors then the print versions.

I'm guessing that once the ready to print digital file has been created (and PDFs would make a good formatting stable file for that), that is all the publishers keep on hand. If so, this would be a good example of publishers need to adapt to keep up with technology.

[EricDP]

They think they will go out of business?

Last year I bought about $400 worth of paper books. First quarter of this year, I bought about $100, so I was on target for the same. Somewhere around April I started researching eBooks and readers. When I discovered that an eBook was the same price as a paper book and there were significant restrictions on how I could use it, I started looking for alternatives that were fair. Then I discovered Projet Gutenberg and realized that for free, I could read all those hundreds of classics I'd never got around to reading because I simply couldn't make myself pay full price for a book knowing that $0 went to the original (long dead) author.

I still haven't bought a reader, but this past weekend I read A Christmas Carol on my Blackberry and I'm now reading Gulliver's Travels. I'm enjoying these books far more than I thought I would.

Back to the point: if the publishers think selling eBooks for a reasonable price will bankrupt them, then they are wrong. They will go bankrupt because there are thousands of free books out there and *that* is what they are competing against now. I won't pay another cent for a book until I can:

a) replace everything in my paper library with electronic versions for reasonable cost (e.g. $1 per book sounds reasonable to me - not pay full price *again* for the same book).
b) get electronic versions of new books for reasonable cost ($4-$5 sounds reasonable to me)
c) get assurances that my electronic books will be readable in ten years, twenty years, or more, and won't become unreadable becuase my current 'registered' device is dead, or the format is obsolete and I'm unable to convert it because of DRM issues

Big publishers: you just lost $400/year of revenue that won't come back until you get reasonable. And I suspect I'm not the only one who's stopped buying books, and I also suspect some people were spending a lot more than me. But if you can make the price reasonable, I will start buying new books again.

[Scott Nicholson]

Great, Eric--the digital era is going to lead to an explosion in reading, as we can all find the things we want to read pretty easily--the exception being new hardcover titles controlled by major publishers.

You know the buggy whip manufacturers who survived? They started adult novelty stores...

Scott Nicholson

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

I'm guessing that once the ready to print digital file has been created (and PDFs would make a good formatting stable file for that), that is all the publishers keep on hand. If so, this would be a good example of publishers need to adapt to keep up with technology.

Even a Word file can be full of crap. But at least there are much easier ways to eliminate the crap from a Word file then it is to convert a PDF. Because the crap in a Word file does not mess up the text, just the formatting.

But still, there's no excuse for starting off with a PDF file for the other eBook editions. None at all.

[L.J. Sellers]

The idea that every e-book sold replaces a print book is simply wrong. E-book sales are growing at a much higher rate that print book sales are declining. So overall, e-books are expanding the market.
L.J.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Even a Word file can be full of crap. But at least there are much easier ways to eliminate the crap from a Word file then it is to convert a PDF. Because the crap in a Word file does not mess up the text, just the formatting.

But still, there's no excuse for starting off with a PDF file for the other eBook editions. None at all.

I fully agree. E-Books should start out with fully editable files such as Word files. What I was trying to point out was formatting in Word is unstable (especially if illustrated). The formatting in PDFs is stable and that is probably why publishers like to use them for print ready copy instead of Word docs. That is probably the reason why many publishers are having to convert PDFs to e-books is all they retained of the original editted manuscripts were the print ready files, thinking they were all they would ever need (short-sighted thinking considering how cheap storage is now; it's not like they need to store hard copies).

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by L.J. Sellers

The idea that every e-book sold replaces a print book is simply wrong. E-book sales are growing at a much higher rate that print book sales are declining. So overall, e-books are expanding the market.
L.J.

And even if every e-book sold replaces a print book, so what? If the publisher whose print book has been replaced wasn't the one who sold the e-book, then it's the publisher's fault for not keeping up with the times. There is no standing still anymore. One must keep up or get left in the dust.

[Fbone]

How many copies of a hard cover need to be sold for it to be profitable to the publisher?

I think (perhaps incorrectly) that the increased use of libraries have affected the large publishing company's revenue. I recently discovered that my local library circulated over 1 million items (including audio and video) last year. What percentage of lost sales does that represent? And this is only one small suburban town.

Maybe this is offset by libraries purchasing multiple copies and items but with municipal and state budget constraints this could change. Crazy thought ... publishers actually want libraries to close.

[BVLarson]

An embarrassing thrust of the head fully into the proverbial sand. I find it hard to believe the old-school publishers aren't scrambling to restructure themselves. They will not survive unless they utterly embrace the transformation their industry is about to undergo. Content prices WILL fall, the only question will be if they will fall to ZERO or not. Music is considered "free" by so many of the young now. Same with movies. Possibly even a "subscription-based" system should be looked at, like those 20,000 netflix instant-watch movies...

[saoir]

Originally Posted by BVLarson

An embarrassing thrust of the head fully into the proverbial sand. I find it hard to believe the old-school publishers aren't scrambling to restructure themselves. They will not survive unless they utterly embrace the transformation their industry is about to undergo. Content prices WILL fall, the only question will be if they will fall to ZERO or not. Music is considered "free" by so many of the young now. Same with movies. Possibly even a "subscription-based" system should be looked at, like those 20,000 netflix instant-watch movies...

What many are missing here is the psychology of profit in the modern multinational.

I agree with all of the contributions above exposing that production of ebooks is far far less costly than that of paper books. Adding to that the savings in distribution and retailer margin, the only rational and logical conclusion that can be reached is that Publishers could easily sell ebooks at a significantly lower price than paper books and make the SAME profit.

So we are left with the question .. why don't they ?

This is where I believe it gets murky. Yes old fashioned prejudice play a role. Fear of new technology. A completely wrong headed impression that illegal file sharing hurt the music industry. etc etc etc.

What we are leaving out here is that by selling these ebooks at the same price or even HIGHER price than paper books (which they are doing) the Publishers are now making super-profits on ebooks during this window of opportunity ... in their minds.

The frustrating thing for forward looking people and for people who can grasp the way the music industry has gained from embracing the new world, is that were these Publishers to open their eyes just a little they would see that by dropping the ebook prices significantly (still making the same profits that they used to) they would expand the market for books enormously and this small window of super-profits would translate into a boom time for publishers.

I know many many MANY people who would buy man many MANY more books if they could afford it. Books are a luxury item for so many people I know who are on middle income. They could afford a reader, at a stretch, and if ebooks were the correct price (in my view about 8 dollars) they would buy many many more of them.

But the Publishers are focused right now a) on the surge of super profits from ebooks, coupled with b) fear of the new business model.