Quote:
Originally Posted by neilmarr
Of course some publishers are greedy (which is counter productive in an emerging market), but the market itself is retail driven.
What's important to remember is that, unless a work is going straight to ebook, the cost of producing a title -- from editorial to promotion -- goes into the treebook. Conversion to digital to offer an ebook equivalent costs very, very little. After that, there are no production or distribution costs involved, just admin to cover, royalies to pay ... and retail.
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Yes, conversion is relatively inexpensive. Unfortunately, the ebook story does not end there. You need storage for your books and a good DAM system to distribute the books. You have to correctly manage the metadata for all of your books, including pricing, rights distribution, etc. And it can't be created in the same standard ONIX file as your tree-book, as it is a seperate ISBN with different sales, different territories, etc. Each format needs a separate ISBN, and if you're chunking your books and selling them that way, each section needs an ISBN.
And you need to proofread your conversion. I could go on. All I'm saying is it's not as simple or cheap as some perceive it to be. That being said, yes, ebooks cost too much, but they will go down.
As ebooks become more the norm, publishers will start working with an XML workflow that allows tagging for both print design and ebook design so the two can be created together. Overhauling your entire workflow is expensive, so publishers are charging more to cover their costs.
Both Shortcovers and Barnes and Noble offer a 50% split on ebooks. Amazon offers something like 70/30 in their favour. Brutal.
Anyway, it'll all pan out. Publishers are constantly debating eBook prices, and we'll see them settle around $12-$14.There's just a lot of production cost as they get going, so they're all trying to recoup right away.
Nic