[starrigger]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

The belief is that it's "a few seconds" more than required for paper production, not that it's only a few seconds, total. That whatever process a publisher uses to format its books for print, could be adapted with relatively little effort to create two output forms: one print-ready, one ebook. Or three ebooks in different formats.

Conversion of raw text to ebook takes substantial time and effort for individuals because they're working with, well, raw text. Publishers aren't--they're working, at some point, with print-ready text, with whatever style & formatting arrangements work for them. They have a steady flow of books formatted with the same processes. If nothing else, I have trouble believing that making PDFs of all their books would take any substantial time per book.

We're both talking about the same thing. Yes, once systems have been developed to seamlessly translate, for example, a typesetter's file into an ebook format, it should be a simple process. But it is not a seamless process right now. The typesetter's files are just too different. I worked with one for my own production of Sunborn, and it was a nightmare. The people at Tor are taking a slightly different avenue, but it's still a laborious process. Yes, it should be automatable, but I suspect part of the problem right now is that someone has to invest the money to develop the software. I'm sure they're working on it. Maybe some publishers have already solved that.

Tor just in the last couple of years started keeping PDF archive files of their books. That, in fact, is what I put up for free for my Sunborn download. But it's a poor starting point for an ebook. Actually a terrible starting point. I tried to use it and gave up.

However, even if an ebook requires starting from scratch, from the same base manuscript sent to the publisher, it doesn't take more effort than making a pbook.

No. But with ebooks being only a small fraction of sales, most publishers aren't going to want to spend that same effort twice, with a low payoff for the ebooks.

Production costs are the same, or roughly equivalent--right up to the point where the pbook is printed. At which point, the pbook gains a whole cluster of costs that ebooks ignore entirely: paper for pages, special paper for covers, binding, inventory tracking, packing, shipping, storage, sales packaging, possible return costs.

Charging the same for both implies that those costs are negligible or non-existent. Charging *more* for ebooks than paperbacks implies that either paper costs less than creating hyperlinks, or that publishers want to discourage ebook sales.

There are distribution costs for ebooks that you're leaving out. As an example, my titles that are available on ereads.com get sold through fictionwise, among other places. Half the take goes to fictionwise. So that's similar to paper books. If they set up their own online store, that costs money. I'm not saying it's more than paper, but I'm not sure it's as much less as is commonly assumed. And remember, right now it's not making all that much money, by comparison.

Having said that, I agree completely that ebooks should not cost more than treebooks. I have argued in favor of lower prices on my own ebooks. I'm hoping some of them will be up on Baen soon, so they'll be available for a lower price. I am completely in favor of lower costs for ebooks. I'd rather sell 1000 copies for a low profit than 100 for a high profit.

I'm just saying it's not as simple as many folk seem to believe.

Side note: One area where I might agree with the cynical view is in textbooks. Clearly an area where ebooks could be of enormous benefit to the user, the student. But my brother is a textbook author, and he says his publisher simply doesn't know what to do about it, and they are, indeed, running scared.