[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by GlennD

There's a lot of talk about the initial costs of getting a pbook printed and distributed. I think that's missing one of the strongest benefits of ebooks for publishers. With a paper book, when there is a second printing the publisher saves some costs because the editing and typesetting is already complete. But, every new printing has costs for the printing itself and distribution. There are risks involved in deciding how many to print - underprint and you may miss your window of opportunity to sell a hot product, overprint and you have large remainder piles that cost more money to deal with. If you sell out a print run, there are always more costs to get more copies to market. Part of what you're paying for with a pbook is the costs of bearing those risks - the bestsellers help pay for the books that don't sell.

This would be of greater benefit to the publisher if more books had second printings. Most don't. The initial press run is all they see. Yes, there are risks in gauging the size of the press run. But the biggest one, offhand, is returns. The largest part of the cost in printing is setup and makeready - the steps of making the plates from which the job will be printed, mounting the plates on the press, doing test prints to insure proper registration and ink coverage. Once those steps are done, the incremental cost of printing additional copies of whatever it is is small. For additional printings, plates are already made, so that step goes away and only mount and test print are required.

With ebooks, you have to recoup the initial costs of editing/typesetting etc. Once you've met those costs, every additional copy sold is pure gravy. You're going to have copies ready no matter how many you sell. If an author becomes a hot commodity with his third book, you already have ecopies of his previous work available in your ebookstore - no rushing an older book back into print. A brick and mortar bookstore doesn't keep copies of older books because it's expensive to do so. With ebooks an author's entire back catalog are there for no additional costs or risk, for as long as the author and publisher have agreed to keep them there.

A brick and mortar store doesn't keep copies of older books because it probably doesn't have the shelf space to stock them. Having back catalog conveniently available is a major plus for ebooks.

Publishers and authors should be jumping all over ebooks - there's a ton of benefit to keeping large back catalogs in (e)print.

The publishers are certainly aware of ebooks. Their challenge is to integrate producing them into their work flow, create the distribution channels to sell them, and let the audience know they exist. The biggest challenge, from their viewpoint, will be making money on them.

Authors are jumping all over them too, witness the Backlist Ebook thread elsewhere on MR.
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Dennis