[Hitch]

Originally Posted by ASterling

I knew I had come across real experts! OK, everyone has identified many problems, and Hitch, it shows you have some potential solutions.

Well, there are a large number of "formatters" who will only do something like fiction. They are not, in my view, real professionals. I don't blame them, mind you; every formatter will tell you that they'd love to have a full docket of fiction. It's nice and easy. But the hardcores like Tex2002ans, etc., will tell you that the challenges are in doing this type of work.

All the textbook companies use Adobe products (as do I) and there are a finite number of book designers that work for them. Occasionally, they do hire out. Wiley does so more than the others.

Well, we use INDD. I know some of the others do, too. We do INDD intake, assuming that the product is done professionally. Now that the Adobe products are available cheaply in the "cloud," (ahem..on a damned server, don't know why on earth anyone uses "in the cloud," other than marketing purposes), every Tom, Dick and Harry is using it, and we've gotten some really FUGLY files. I mean, just horrible. So, we do INDD intake when the files are correct. I assume that the others do, too.

I know the editors and publishers at a lot of these - for this particular book, I know the main actual editor (Sylvan Barnet).

Well, then, you ought to tell them that there are ways to make the content viable. Assuming that the part of the book I saw is representative, it really ought not be made in a PDF. That's daft. I'm attaching three screenshots of a book that we did...last year, IIRC. It's not dissimilar. (n.b.: mods: not pimping here. This is a discussion about whether or not a textbook like the one discussed previously is "doable." These screenshots simply represent a Kindle/MOBI book that's been done that is similar. The book in question had 1200 pages, or thereabouts--and no, it wasn't a $200 book, obviously. It also had hundreds of lists, tables, text-boxes and images. So many images we had to optimize them all as PNG8.)

It is my belief that Amazon doesn't "get" or understand the kind of volume they could do or the entry points for their devices and "content" that is possible by having actual textbooks be easily downloaded and used. We are talking massive volume - multiple editions per-quarter or semester -

Amazon "gets" it, but...why is it their job to make sure that their publishers make the books correctly, or to ensure that their publishers aren't so cheap that they take the freebie way out, instead of the paid way? Doing a book properly, like this, takes MONEY. Whether they pay someone in-house, or they pay a company like mine, it's not going to be free. I mean, haven't they done enough for the publisher by doing the Textbook format for freebs? A book like the one I showed you is going to be thousands of dollars to do. Compared to nought. Publisher's choice.

Probably the device/platform where the biggest entry points are present is Apple. We work with them and I have to say in our experience, for books that are right in iBooks, their numbers are correct. They will sell in a 1:2 ratio vs. Kindle (1 iBook for every 2 Kindle books sold).

Sure, because Apple's reader isn't a dedicated e-reader; it's effectively a tablet with reading software. They have the luxury of being Apple, and ignoring the standards, while they're at it. They've put out software expressly designed to create textbooks, that works solely on their platform, so...sure, the textbooks made with iBooks look and work pretty great. They're more interactive. Lots to be said for that. Lots to be said against it (e.g., you can't use the same file for Nook, or Sony, or anyone else, even Kobo, which is effectively an iBooks Mini-Me.)

For the actual volume numbers - all books - not just e-books - I derived the WalMart vs. Amazon numbers off their quarterly reports and Hoovers. WalMart reports total by-department sales once a year. So the book department is accounted for on its own. No additional calculations required. I called them and they confirmed that their e-commerce and in-store sales are combined together. For Amazon, I had a major confusion with their financial statements for a long time. It turns out that "media" sales reported in their statements includes *everything*. This is like all downloads, magazines, everything that's delivered for a price across their platforms and devices. It did *not* include the cloud services, which are under "other." Bottom line, their total of all that is less than WalMart's total of its games/software and book sales. It is almost impossible to break out the book-only totals for Amazon. However, I think it is about $6.5 billion - that's just cracking it off their total reported worldwide "Media" sales of $22.5 billion.

Given that WalMart doesn't sell eBooks, isn't that a bit (no pun intended) Apples to Oranges?

The overall book publishing and sales market worldwide is about $160 billion right now (as per the European Book Publishers Association). So at about $6.5 billion, Amazon's total book sales are about 5% of the total world book publishing market. Yet from all the heat, light and everything else, one would think it is 100% of book sales, everyone is reading e-books on Kindle only ...

Even my international clients, some of whom are publishing super-stars, are all Amazon, all the time. Amazon may not be the biggest kid on the block in print (don't know), but I have only ONE client, with a book on self-hypnosis, that does well on iBooks. it does nothing on Nook (which, interestingly enough, seems to do well with Literary Fiction), but all the rest are doing a highly disproportionate ratio on Amazon.

I also think that you have to consider that to be accurate, in terms of Amazon's market share, you have to compare not "world-wide" figures, but Amazon's figures to the sales figures of those countries in which it is present. For example, if Book Sales worldwide include, say, Iceland (which has the most books per capita in the world, ALLEGEDLY, if you believe the meme that's rampant on the Net), and Amazon's not in that marketplace, then the figures are statistically corrupt. You need to compare Amazon's sales with US Sales, Canadian Sales, UK sales, Italian Sales, etc. Otherwise, the numbers really don't add up, to coin a phrase.

Peter Hildick-Smith has been saying for a long time that e-books are going to top out at no more than 25% of the TRADE book market (what is being formatted/what consists of the Kindle sales - trade fiction & nonfiction). Peter is right. There is no evidence that's growing and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is only so much that the current group of device users and consumers can "consume" of the type of product that the devices can deliver.

If a country doesn't have B&N, doesn't have Amazon, that leaves iBooks and Sony, both of which are, in terms of books, minor players. (And before all the Jobblesheads get hysterical, I mean, vis-a-vis Apple, simply BOOK sales in the iBookstore.) How can we compare the "reality" of what percentage of books will be put out in TRADE, if we're comparing two unrelated things?

The world market will, of course, be skewed toward print, because many (MANY) countries have no e-readers, no platforms, nada. They can only obtain their books in print, or by reading on their smartphones, assuming that they have those, and have a way to buy books from iBooks or Google or..?. That's hardly viable, statistically speaking.

In 20 years, who's to say what the numbers will be, when Amazon, et al, have expanded into those countries? When their languages are supported? When they can buy devices? Right now, you're comparing a world with thousands of languages against a platform that is predominantly English, with a mere smattering of (mostly) Euro-based languages that can be displayed or supported. What about languages that are read R-to-L? What happens, for that matter, when Chinese is supported? Hindi? Mmmmm....remember that only a VERY few languages are supported on the Amazon platform at this time. You need embedded fonts to support many of the as-yet-unsupported languages (like Cyrillic, for example). As Amazon hasn't stopped supporting its older devices, like the K2, it can't support Cyrillic, because the older devices don't support embedded fonts. No embedded fonts= no Cyrillic. No Chinese. No Japanese. No anything that needs characters that are outside of the default font set. That's a LOT OF LANGUAGES.

Another type of product that could be consumed, and in fact - there is a tremendous hunger and need for - is what we have been discussing. Textbooks. I have students also buying/needing "other" books that fit in the trade sector.

We'll see. As I said, it's one thing for publishers to make them available, but the purchasing process, by school districts, could also interfere in this marketplace. I can certainly see it for College and University courses, and of course, any Internet learning classes. (I'm also not quite sure about where the money really goes, in the school-->Schoolbook purchasing process. I'm not casting aspersions, not at all, but there may well be parties which don't WANT eBooks of textbooks to become available for students. Dunno, don't claim to know.)

That "topped out" figure would change a lot, and fast, I think, if the books that are needed for many reasons (technical, educational, work-related, skill related) could be delivered well via e-reading devices. And, there are other, entertainment or enjoyment purposes as well.

Well...I have to say, most of the books we're building now are in that category, and I think most of the more-known firms would tell you the same thing. We haven't done mostly fiction in a few years now. Non-fiction books and DIY books, etc., are not new, in digital form.

The original Amazon Kindle build engineer (his patent was just made public - now everybody wants him) is our "CTO". He swore to me up and down this device was supposed to do everything - the hardware was built to reproduce a book that could include color photos, audio, video, you name it. But that's not the reality. The reality is I just saw discussions where the "converter" is stripping fonts out of books! I could comment about the way the e-device displays leading and handles a lot of things. Because there's been many years between Chris' original work and the original team's work and what is there today.

No--you saw a discussion that the uploader is stripping fonts. It's a converter, I suppose, for people uploading Word files, but that's a different tier of "bookmaking."

And no--the early Kindles certainly weren't designed, and didn't support, all those things. Hell, you couldn't even do a table on the first-gen Kindle, nor images in color. Or, for that matter, images that weren't the full size of the screen, not on the first-gen. Perhaps what he meant was that he was the build engineer on the first Fire device, and you thought he meant the first Kindles? You absolutely couldn't do audio/video on ANY e-ink Kindle, whether it's first, second, etc., gen. The Video would be fairly dreadful, if it played (as are most websites, on something like a K2). I suppose that audio might be possible, but the filesize would be an interesting issue.

And the NY Times just reported how Amazon treats employees (Chris was hospitalized at the end of his project after too many 'calls from Jeff'). I can't even get the dude on the phone who volunteered to help me put my short fiction on the early Kindle sales stuff - if he's survived over 10 years with them, that explains, maybe he can't even use a phone any more!

Is this the same report that is actually talking about the warehouse "employees" that aren't actually Amazon employees? You know, I've been dealing directly with folks in Seattle for 5 years now, since 2010, when we were added to their Professional Converter's list. I don't know of any who've left. Not one. They work in the "big" Tech Support (not the call center), in ECR (Executive Customer Relations), in various divisions (Kindle, KDP, Createspace, Look-Inside [Yes, Virginia, there's a Look-inside DEPARTMENT], etc.) Five years down the line, and they're still there. None have burned out, been hospitalized, etc. I chat with them on the phone, and none of them sound insane or on the edge to me. FWIW.

Be that as it may. Heck yes there is a market for good electronic versions of textbooks that can be read on devices in class with page maps etc.

And they mayn't even need page-maps. Yes, most likely, as Silverbacks don't want to change their class plans, they'll be needed, but strewth, it's not hard to look up a sentence or a phrase or a fragment, as Tex2002ans mentioned. We can always DO them, although it's a pain. Any competent bookmaker can. It's up to the publishers to decide to spend the money to make the books. I know that scads of bookmakers are out there chasing them, ALL. (I know this, again, because I get not less than 3, usually 5, emails a week from Indian and other outsourcing firms strenuously urging me to go chase Textbook work and sub-contract it to them [as if]. All the outsourced companies are convinced that this is the Next Big Thing. But the reality, for the eBook PRODUCER, is that it's just one book. The publisher and Amazon may sell 50K copies; but for the producer, it's just a single book, however complex.)

(I'm not sure what the next post you posted, the one that starts "Oh!..." is replying to, so..I'm simply replying to this one.)

Hitch