Quote:
Originally Posted by eGeezer
First of all, the book has been put into some electronic format in order to feed the book-printing machine. Other than a little formating at the touch of a button, there probably isn't any real human involvement in prepping for the paperback edition other than loading the paper into the book-printer. That's probably done by a machine, too.
So the prevalent $9.99 (US) pback retail price which is routinely discounted to between $4 and $7 still represents an acceptable income for the ubiquitous author/editor/publisher/distributor/retailer family.
So. Now let's remove the cost of converting a tree to a book, whatever gallons of ink might cost, the shipping costs to get the tree books to the stores, and the cost of actual people to unpack and shelve the books. All we now have left is the electronic file that was originally created to send to the printing device.
At the cost of maintaining a server and a hard drive to store the file, the book can be sold to anyone who wants to download it (for a fee).
So lets acknowledge that the author still has a right to the same income per book -- no argument from me on that. And the editor/publisher guys/gals should make about the same amount of income as they do from the pback just because it wouldn't have finally appeared as an ebook without their efforts.
Now we get to the head-scratching part. The distributor and retailer don't need to pay for anything except a few pennies for maintaining the servers/harddrive. Actually, I guess the distributor might have a complaint because by now he should be completely out of the loop.
If pbacks can be routinely discounted 20-50% with everyone happy with their profit, how come ebooks can't be permanently sold at that 20-50% reduction from pbacks? I don't see where the author, let alone every other link in the distribution chain has a complaint.
Like I said. I'm old, and perhaps my brain just isn't working. But it seems pretty simple to me.
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No, but the flaw in your assumptions is that making a treebook and making an ebook are nearly identical processes, with a big cost saving if you skip some of the treebook steps. That's just not true. Omitting the printing steps saves (as best anyone can account for) about $1.
The camera-ready copy for a printing process, and a good ebook are not anywhere near identical. The ebook needs to be created from the copyeditor and proofreader's final output in a separate process than that which creates the camera ready copy. That costs $0.?? per book. The cost of servers and retail order processing (whoever does it) eats up another small part of that $1. It's no different than any other retail transaction fee. So the ebook has a unique production step, and unique distribution costs, that mostly eliminate its cost advantage.
The only unique advantage ebooks have is in inventory and returns costs. Those, as I understand it, are well understood and accounted for in the current process, and don't add much cost.
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Now if you want to get incensed when someone charges _MORE_ for an ebook than a MMPB, I'm right behind you on the barricades, brother. Death to the Aristos! Up the Revolution.
Viva la Revolucion,
Jack Tingle