Quote:
Originally Posted by John F
[Sarcasm]
How can Fictionwise stay in business? Multiple formats of ebooks? I thought that Ebook production costs were similar to pbooks?
[/Sarcasm]
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eBook production costs are similar to pbooks. But those production costs mostly aren't per-format costs. Ebooks have the same costs as pbooks in terms of fixed overhead (editors, acquisition, slush-pile diving, etc.), and share many of the same per-book costs with pbooks (proof-reading, art-work, editorial attention to purchased story, marketing, etc.). Ebooks avoid a minority of the production costs of paper (printing, shipping, warehousing, inventory). But ebooks also bring some new costs of their own -- format conversions (including making sure that the automatic conversion didn't completely hose some important aspect of the book), managing electronic data (well known in the tech world, but new to most of publishing; not too expensive once you know what you are doing), and tech support (
e.g. "why doesn't this book work on my device?") to name a few.
Note that the fixed costs are, in essence, shared across all publications from a given company whether P or E. Many per-book costs are shared between dead-tree and ebook editions of each book. There are some dead-tree only costs; there are also ebook-only costs. See above for some examples of each.
I suspect that Fictionwise is doing what I do with books I buy -- use Calibre to convert to the desired set of formats, and don't even bother looking to see whether there's a problem until someone gets around to reading the book. It's the cheap approach. Some customers (or family members, in my case) may encounter unfortunate problems introduced during the conversion process.
Xenophon
P.S. The really BIG win with eBooks is the opportunity to knock an entire level of distribution out of the chain between author and reader. That's a place to get 30%-50% price improvements.