[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by alecE

I'd suggest that the debate on ebook pricing demonstrates the immature and changing nature of the market:
- yes, publishers are still treating ebooks as an add-on, rather than as an integral part of the production process. I wonder though if this is exacerbated by having to convert the backlist? I'd like to hope that in time ebook creation will be the starting point for the workflow.

You and me both, but it requires the tools to do it.

Most publishers these days use Adobe InDesign to do markup and typesetting, and generate the PDF files handed off the the printer to feed to an imagesetter and create plates to print from. InDesign currently has ePub as an output format, but does it badly. Good ePub starts with well-formed XML, but the tools to do typeset and markup and output to XML for conversion to ePub are still in development and not widespread.

ePub contains all the metadata, so once an ePub files exists, conversion to other desired ebook formats should be straight-forward and automated.

The trick is getting ebook files as part of the standard workflow.

- Quality - my impression is that too many ebooks are still not being proofed properly and contain many more typos than I would ever expect in a pbook. What I don't know is how the proportion of typos varies between pbooks converted to ebooks late in life and titles produced as ebooks from the very start.

One current problem is that proofing increasingly isn't done, for any book. Publishers are trying to cut costs and see proofreading as dispensable.

In the case of ebooks created from paper volumes it's worse. A lot of Amazon's Kindle editions didn't have electronic files available when the decision was made to offer a Kindle edition. The Kindle file was created by scan and OCR of a paper volume. Proofing was not done on them. It costs.

- Hardware display - I love my 505, BUT, the quality of display for illustrations is poor. Until the hardware can do justice to graphic content, ebooks (at least in the non-fiction arena) are surely going to be the poor relations?

Depends on the ebooks. I'm not in the market for a dedicated reader, among other reasons because I want color support, and eInk currently doesn't have it. Among other things, I'm accumulating children's books illustrated by folks like Caldecott and Rackham. No, a grey-scale conversion of a color original is not acceptable...

For technical books, I think we are pretty much stuck with PDF as the format, precisely to get the graphics quality.

- Imagination (or lack therof) - the reference to a "Director's cut" version of ebooks is brilliant. Just think what could be done in terms of supporting material for a series, say LOTR or Discworld.

*shrug*

ePub is a container. What it contains doesn't have to be text. I think we'll start seeing stuff along htis line, but it reqquires other issues to be dealt with first.

- Regional restrictions - these may make sense to a publisher, but to the consumer it's insane and looks like what it is - an outdated business model. Surely publishers need to start looking at the internet as a single (new) region?

I wish it were that simple. An old friend who was an executive editor are a major publisher, and is now a freelance writer made the following comment:

If the publisher offers enough money, we'll sell world (world English, anyway) rights... But that requires all arms of a multinational publisher to work together, not at cross-purposes, and that's almost impossible to manage, for both structural and market reasons.

It is a very large zip-lock bag of worms.

She's quite right, and that's if there is a multinational publisher interested who can handle world rights. If not, it gets more complex.

Although the music industry is often quoted as an example of how to get it badly wrong, I'm struck by the similarity with IBM's agonies with the PC; the necessity for change is self-evident but the resistance to change is massive.

IBM's agony with the PC had a different source. While IBM developed it and created the specs on which everyone based their own models, the PC became a commodity, with commodity pricing and razor thin margins. IBM eventually decided they didn't want to try to compete in that market, as they've never been a "lowest cost producer". They sold the operation to Lenovo. Note that Dell, who historically has tried to be the low cost producer, is now diversifying, a recently bought a big services outfit to diversify their revenue stream.
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Dennis