Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob
Those are people problems, not technical issues. If there was an edit to do it, it would be done.
...
So, maybe I should restate, a publisher setting up to sell eBooks directly to the end consumer would be simple... but not easy.
My point it, it is certainly doable.
BOb
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Well yes: indeed, I've got all the facilities and resources I need to do it myself,
if it made sense to do so. (Got a colo server: check. Got a web platform that has been fire-tested through regular slashdotting/boingboing-ing: check. Married to a typesetter with an Adobe DTP workstation: check. Can hack perl: check. Got a Paypal merchant account: check.)
I think, however, that you underestimate the people problems.
And you overestimate the profitability of ebooks, too. Bluntly: yes, Baen have managed to make money at it. But it's nothing spectacular -- their ebook sales volumes are comparable to their hardcover sales volumes, and an order of magnitude below their mass market paperback sales. This is excellent going compared to the rest of the publishers (who in many cases sell so few DRMd/overpriced books that they don't even recoup the cost of paying someone at their typesetting bureau to hit the "Publish" button in Mobipocket Creator), but it's not setting the publishing world on fire. And, more importantly, it's not profitable enough to goad the execs in the big publishing houses to risk their jobs by going
contra the received wisdom.
This will change over time (indeed, I believe Tor is making progress in this direction, but not yet publicly). But it's going to take years, not months. Because? As I said earlier: the practices of the publishing industry have evolved, and they're the vector sum of those practices that
didn't make some other publisher go bust at some point in the past two centuries. And what you're asking for goes
against some of those survival-honed best practices.