Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Tingle
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.
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Having worked as DTP'er for educational textbooks I can say that this is a totally wrong assumption.
When working as a professional you have all required styles for a book defined in a tag - all you do is tag the appropriated text and make sure no orphans are created, the header and the footer are consistent and the register is accurate. (This was for me the main reason to get started creating HTML - only tagged texts with a nice layout = very very similar)
Therefore a properly tagged manuscript can be used to create either a pBook AND an eBook. So an eBook can be the by-product of an pBook and has a lower costprice than an pBook.
Publishers are stupid by not reusing the half-product to catch up on the backlog on requested eBooks; and use their own stupidity as an lame excuse to price an eBook as a separate product.
I refuse to pay the full price for a byproduct that is cheaper to distribute and cheaper to reproduce