Quote:
Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
If you are issuing only an electronic edition, you don't have returns, but you still have all of the other costs involved in producing a book.
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Actually, that isn't quite true. Layout is simplified since you don't have to worry about pagination, "warehousing" is dramatically reduced (servers, which don't have to be owned by the publishers, vs. physical buildings and the infrastructure to run them), shipping is essentially nil, no printing and paper is required, etc.
Writing, editing, and marketing (including promotion) would remain the same or equivalent. |
I've talked about this elsewhere. Printing, binding, warehousing, and distribution amount to perhaps 20% of the total cost of a printed book. An electronic edition drops those costs, but the others remain. Layout and pagination are simplified, but costs don't drop that much because they are.
Current industry practice is to get Word documents as the manuscript, edit those till an accepted final form is agreed upon, then import that into Adobe InDesign for typesetting and markup. Pagination and layout can be changed in InDesign or other DTP program a
lot more easily than in the old days where you used rubber cement to paste up typeset galleys onto a mechanical that would be photographed and turned into a plate by the printer's prepress operation. Changing layout and pagination required running off new galleys and redoing mechanicals. (I used to do stuff like that for a living, in the days before DTP.)
The output from InDesign is normally a PDF that is sent to the printer. The printer feeds it to an imagesetter to make the plates from which the book will be printed. Current versions of InDesign can also output ePub files, but do so poorly. One wish is for better support for ePub in InDesign, so producing the ePub becomes a Save As operation when the book is ready to publish.
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Dennis