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Secondly they are hamstrung by an old fashioned and outdated pricing system that totally lacks a wholesale - retail pricing structure.This results in a constant state of uncertainty of income and profit calculations.
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Publishers have a tiered pricing structure. If you are someone like Amazon, your wholesale price is about 50% of retail. (And Amazon was pushing for
higher discounts, which was part of the background over the standoff on Kindle edition pricing with the major publishers.)
If you are a smaller bookstore chain or an independant, you go through a distributor like Ingrams or Baker and Taylor, who take a cut off the top, so the wholesale price will be higher. The standard library discount is 40%.
The uncertainty in income and profit calculations is simple: you don't know until you issue it how well the book will
sell.
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There is on thing we do know for sure though. That is that the widespread claims by the Publishers of enormous costs in creating eBooks are totally and evidently false. The credibility of the industry is at basement level when they repeatedly issue transparently comical woe-is-me claims.
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As it stands now, ebook creation stands outside of the normal publishing workflow.
Most trade publishers normally get manuscripts as Word documents, edit, copy edit, and proofread those, then import the manuscript into Adobe InDesign for typesetting and markup. The output from Adobe is a PDF file which goes to the printer. The printer feeds the PDF to an imagesetter that creates the plates used to print the books. (Publishers used to use Quark Express for this step, but most have migrated to InDesign.
InDesign creates ePub files...badly. (Recent point releases are supposed to have improved this, but I haven't heard it's where it needs to be.)
Creating eBook files is currently a separate process outside of the normal publishing workflow, with attendant added costs and complexities. The ideal starting point would be well formed XML, but while the tools exist, they are not widely adopted.
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Dennis