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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Are you talking about new or backlist?
If it's backlist, perhaps the book broke even back in the day. Releasing it as an ebook incurs its own costs, including conversion, formatting and proofreading; it's not necessarily a huge sum, but it does have to be earned back. Plus the retailers and authors get their cut. So if you spend $10k on the conversion, price it at $10, and make $3 profit per ebook sold, you still need to move over 3300 units just to break even -- actually more, once you start figuring in taxes..
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Are you trying to tell me that the books that have been or are being printed are not already stored in digital format by the publisher? Are you really telling me that the publisher is still using a plate style press to print books now instead of using a digital format to print operation??? If so I could "buy" the idea that the cost to "convert" the book to e-reader format would be that high. Frankly I have a real hard time believing that. Conversion of one digital format to another is a software operation, not a scan every paper page situation. Of course copy proofing is going to be required to make sure that all of the book got transferred properly to the new format, but that is done once for each format. I certainly do expect the publisher will earn back their costs. I do not see where they figure to earn back print costs more than once for a product they are not selling in print at that sale.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
If it's new, and you release the ebook at the same time as the initial printing, then the ebook -- in addition to incurring its own costs -- is cannibalizing paper sales. Nor is there any sort of guarantee that a specific paper book is going to break even.
Plus, the reality is that the printing part is currently a small part of the costs of the book -- ballpark is 10-15%. The rest is the author's advance, royalties, editing, proofreading, marketing, taxes, overhead, retailer's cut, etc etc
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Here you just made my point. Nothing in business is guaranteed to make a profit, books included. You either cater to the customer or fail. The customer does not owe you a living unless you provide what they want, at the desired price.
Regarding "editing, proofreading" operations, that is required once per format, assuming you "publish" the e-book in multiple formats. Other than doing it one time it is not necessary to "reprint" an e-book, you just have it available for download, the file stays the same. With the print version and format to digital reader, the publisher has already paid the costs of everything other than royalties and taxes. Overhead is minimal considering there is no real "warehousing" of a digital file unlike printed books, paper and related shipping equipment / costs. Since the publisher is already going to keep the book in digital storage format for printings, original and subsequent releases, unless there will be a redesign of the cover overhead stays the same. Two digital files take little more "warehousing" room than does one file.
Assuming digital sales are less than 10% of all retail sales for books (and I think I am really over estimating the digital sales there) there is going to be little fratricide in sales. E-book folks want the e-book and paper book readers want the paper version. Given a good price for the digital version there is little reason to "rip" the book just to convert it to an e-reader format by a user. Should publication dates be different, say 6 months later for the e-book I figure the print sales would not suffer very much at all for the first release certainly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Sorry, that's not going to happen. New ebooks are almost certainly going to stay in the $10-$20 range. Backlist will likely stick to $7-10.
The cost savings are nowhere near significant enough to slash book prices by 50-75%.
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I disagree with you. Once the book has been set to the desired e-reader format there are no printing costs. There are no shipping costs. There are no losses of non-sales at the store where the cover is ripped and the printed book discarded. There is only the cost to do the sale at the website. At that point the sale of each book should be practically pure profit for the publisher once their royalties and taxes for income are factored. Other than the bandwidth used at the time of sale and credit card fees from the bank there are no real costs to make the sale. Heck it should even count as a "green" concept since the only real consumption of resources at the point of sale is the depreciation of internet equipment and use of electricity. No trees or fuel were used to get that "book" to the customer.
Don't forget that the cover price has already factored the profit for the retailer as well. Given that there is really no retailer for an e-book purchased from the publisher a reduction in price there would be reasonable as well. Why should the publisher not sell the e-book at wholesale on a direct to the customer transaction? The publishers costs and profit have already been met at the wholesale price.
