Hello everybody. Somebody to help me a bit?

[tibiafry]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

i think the best way for a publisher to succeed in ebooks is to concentrate on giving the best possible experience to their paying customers : that means reasonable prices and no drm.

Problem 1: "reasonable price". Who tells what is a reasonable price? The publishing company? The author? The buyer?

We already (and haven't started comercializing yet!) recieved a lot of negative feedback on the price our ebooks have, and they already don't know what price it has! (LOL? WTF?).

So, I'm assuming, that we can't have that requisite. Customers will allways feel that the ebooks are too expensive.


Problem 2: You all said your point of view on why would you pay instead getting it for free. Let me be simple: this is how people works. Stephen King had an idea some time ago. He offered a Novel by chapters on the net. You could just read the chapter for free or pay for it. Mr King said, if more than 50% of the people pays for a chapter, I'll write the next one. Guess how many chapters he wrote? Yes, you got it!

So let's assume and be realistic that most of the people will get things for free if they can.

The Potter digital thing, just confirms it. What would a "legal" person do if he can't get a legal electronic copy of the book? I guess the answer isn't geting a pirated ilegal version, isn't it?

I'm sorry my point of view differs, but I guess I live from this thing, and I expected to live forever before all this thing of the digital era came threatening my job (and I promise you I'm not "rich", I have bank mortages like all of you, etc).

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by tibiafry

Problem 1: "reasonable price". Who tells what is a reasonable price? The publishing company? The author? The buyer?

We already (and haven't started comercializing yet!) recieved a lot of negative feedback on the price our ebooks have, and they already don't know what price it has! (LOL? WTF?).

So, I'm assuming, that we can't have that requisite. Customers will allways feel that the ebooks are too expensive.

hm, i don't know where you got negative feedback on your prices... i certainly wasn't implying they are too high, since (as you say) i don't know what they are. i was just pointing out that if you provide someone with a reasonably priced, easy to buy legally, drm-free ebook, most people are very happy to buy it instead of looking for other options.

as for what is a reasonable price, i think in general people agree that an ebook should be cheaper than a paperback, and certainly should not be sold for the same price as a hardcover book (a lot of publishers do this). have you visited any of the other ebook publishers i mentioned ? baen books for instance sells their books for i believe 6$, and everyone agrees this is reasonable. in fact we recently had another publisher recently post asking if we thought his prices were fair ; everyone said they did, even a little low. one poster said that at 5$ or lower, he doesn't even think about it, he just buys ; at 10$ or more, he has to think about it a lot first.

Problem 2: You all said your point of view on why would you pay instead getting it for free. Let me be simple: this is how people works. Stephen King had an idea some time ago. He offered a Novel by chapters on the net. You could just read the chapter for free or pay for it. Mr King said, if more than 50% of the people pays for a chapter, I'll write the next one. Guess how many chapters he wrote? Yes, you got it!

So let's assume and be realistic that most of the people will get things for free if they can.

The Potter digital thing, just confirms it. What would a "legal" person do if he can't get a legal electronic copy of the book? I guess the answer isn't geting a pirated ilegal version, isn't it?

I'm sorry my point of view differs, but I guess I live from this thing, and I expected to live forever before all this thing of the digital era came threatening my job (and I promise you I'm not "rich", I have bank mortages like all of you, etc).

i'm sorry you feel that way. sure there will always be people who want something for nothing ; but these are not lost sales, because if they don't want to pay, they wouldn't buy your book anyway. but not everybody is like that, and i think it's sad when publishers put everyone in the same sack like that and make the honest people pay for the others.

music and film industries have already been down this road, they tried drm, and now they are abandoning it because they have realised it doesn't work and only makes their customers angry (sony root-kit debacle for example).

and there was an article in the Wall Street Journal today you might find interesting :

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Here's an related quote from today's (well in the inside of the paper) Wall Street Journal from the music world....

"Warner Music Post Unexpected Profit"

"Warner Music recorded a 23 million dollar profit compared to a 16 million dollar loss the year earlier....Revenues decreased 11%....Recorded music revenue fell 12%, while digital revenue - which now makes up 20% of total revenue - rose 18%....In November, Warner's Atlantic Records became the first major label to have US digital sales outstrip audio CD sales."

WSJ Southwest Edition, page B7


Apparently some of the music industry is starting to do what's necessary to survive. If only the book business could learn to think.....

mp3s are much easier to copy and distribute on p2p networks than books are but clearly a lot of people are still willing to pay them.

[June]

Originally Posted by tibiafry

- - -So let's assume and be realistic that most of the people will get things for free if they can.

The Potter digital thing, just confirms it. What would a "legal" person do if he can't get a legal electronic copy of the book? I guess the answer isn't geting a pirated ilegal version, isn't it?- - -

No, I have to disagree. If it isn't available as a legal ebook, then I either don't buy it at all (usually) or if it is something I really really want to read then I borrow the paper book at the library, or as a last resort, buy the paper book (pocket version).

[tibiafry]

I really appreciate your answers and POVs. I'll take them into account.

[Amalthia]

Originally Posted by tibiafry

You see music and film industry that is really (excuse me for this word) fucked up, and you just don't want to end without job. My tought is, I have to protect my business, because why would somebody pay for something that can be downloaded from free? (P2P, rapidshare, megaupload,... you know the thing, I'm sure). I'd like you to think from this point of view a little.

Thanks again for your valuable help

not sure if this response is too late or not but as someone that regularly downloads ebooks via other sources that don't cost money I can best answer why I do occasionally break out of the mold of downloading "free" ebooks.

1) I do buy from Baen because their prices are reasonable (4-8 dollar range) and I can download the ebooks in whatever format I like and as many times I as I like. This has value to me.

2) I'm a grad student that works full time so my time is actually rather valuable. I'm assuming you've never tried to find a well formatted ebook via IRC? If so you'd know it could take 30 minutes to an hour going through various downloaded copies checking to make sure there are no OCR errors, italics and bolded text are in place, indents...I can't really complain about "free" ebooks but some of them have serious qualilty issues...which is why if the book is from Baen I'll go spend 6 dollars and buy and load onto my reader in less than 10 minutes.

For a book that costs over 10 dollars...I figured it's worth the extra 10 or 20 minutes to find a "free copy" because well I don't have that kind of money to buy ebooks that cost more than the paperback copy I can get on Amazon.com for .20 cents used..

3) I've yet to run across anything that hasn't been "cracked" whether it be music, software, or ebooks. Once the format has been out awhile someone will eventually get fed up and find a work around. The pirates are very determined to use the content they paid for and are incredibly intelligent. I can't help but think DRM is a losing war. no matter what format comes out I do believe in time the format will have a work around.

So basically, I think it's really smart for publishers to make buying their ebooks more attractive and convenient than the alternatives, which are FREE and becoming increasingly easy to use as well.

Adding DRM makes buying ebooks way too complicated.

[zelda_pinwheel]

i just saw this article about drm and epub and i thought it might interest you :
http://booksquare.com/big-bad-three-...blem-like-drm/

[zelda_pinwheel]

another honest customer having trouble because of drm :
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=39961

[tibiafry]

Originally Posted by Amalthia

2) I'm a grad student that works full time so my time is actually rather valuable. I'm assuming you've never tried to find a well formatted ebook via IRC? If so you'd know it could take 30 minutes to an hour going through various downloaded copies checking to make sure there are no OCR errors, italics and bolded text are in place, indents...I can't really complain about "free" ebooks but some of them have serious qualilty issues...which is why if the book is from Baen I'll go spend 6 dollars and buy and load onto my reader in less than 10 minutes.

Hey that was interesting, and we're having trouble ourselves in the conversion to ebook formats (mobipocket only for the moment, epub and PDF will come soon) because we can't select indents, or spaces between paragraphs (you know when you have a time lapse you usually give space between paragraphs bigger, etc). Well it's an adventure and we've got to learn.

About the drm (zelda_pinwheel), well. I tried my best to convince partners, but the decision it's not on me. It depends on other people. Thanks for the links I'll look at them when I have a little of time this weekend

Thanks everybody.

[Amalthia]

Originally Posted by tibiafry

Hey that was interesting, and we're having trouble ourselves in the conversion to ebook formats (mobipocket only for the moment, epub and PDF will come soon) because we can't select indents, or spaces between paragraphs (you know when you have a time lapse you usually give space between paragraphs bigger, etc). Well it's an adventure and we've got to learn.

About the drm (zelda_pinwheel), well. I tried my best to convince partners, but the decision it's not on me. It depends on other people. Thanks for the links I'll look at them when I have a little of time this weekend

Thanks everybody.

Calibre may be able to help with that problem. There's an option to remove spaces between paragraphs and you can add css coding for indents. I think it may have mobi2mobi capablities...or you can format shift to mobi2epub and get at least one good version and then format shift the epub back to mobi?

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by Amalthia

Calibre may be able to help with that problem. There's an option to remove spaces between paragraphs and you can add css coding for indents. I think it may have mobi2mobi capablities...or you can format shift to mobi2epub and get at least one good version and then format shift the epub back to mobi?

calibre might indeed help, but in that case the best practice would be to create the epub first from clean xhtml code and then convert to mobipocket (which is very easy to do). mobipocket to epub will give poorer results, because mobipocket code is not very good.

[tibiafry]

I'll take good note of that thing. Thanks.