Quote:
Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel
(should i mention how much money they would save, if they dropped DRM and its associated costs ?  not to mention that they would probably thereby increase sales, effectively getting two hits with the same stone...) |
Agreed. I think a few things in the article where more excuses than facts.
For example, the marketing, editing, etc, etc are the same fixed costs for any book... they don't change. For the foreseeable future they are doing those things for every book anyway that they are bring to print.
Also, they talk about file conversion, digital warehousing, etc. Give me a break. Isn't all publishing, layout, done electronically anyway. Are you telling me that publishers don't already have storage facilities for the digital source of their books? Heck, they could use Amazons S3 service with no needed infrastructure and store all they want for $.10 (10 cents) a month per gigabyte. You can store alot of compressed text in a gigabyte.
File conversion? Give me a break. If they used a common source format like .epub which is what they compressed (zip/rar) and stored they could provide that format to printer/retailers etc and the retailers could create the formats that they sell... or even better, .epub could be made avialable directly if only ebook readers would support it. Even if the publisher did the conversions, it takes very little processing power to do this and it could all be automated in a batch when a book is released and then those formats could be stored so the conversion isn't run realtime.
The other cost they talk about such as "infrastructure" is generally borne by the retailer, stuff like web sites, transaction costs, cc processing etc... unless the publisher is going to sell direct.
BOb