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Originally Posted by mcl
i said there were opportunity costs to writing, and that I wouldn't go into them. You simply chose to ignore that.
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No, you said you would ignore those costs as if they were trivial-I was simply pointing out that those costs aren't trivial & that they, too, need to be repaid. (Waste of time being subtle, apparently.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by mcl
You're assuming that ebooks should cover the costs of producing paper books. I am staunchly opposed to that. They could cover their own costs, nothing more.
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Which is *exactly* what I'm saying. Except that I do believe that, in order to stay in business (and therefore produce new books for my future enjoyment), a publisher is entitled to recoup the costs of a book that fails to recoup its own costs by spreading them across the costs of other books.
BTW, I still think you're confusing 'producing' with 'printing'. The cost of producing a book doesn't vary much whether it's a pbook or an ebook.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mcl
Your argument is flawed, since it would only be valid if the editing, etc. did not occur except in cases where ebooks were produced. Since they occur anyway, you cannot blame ebooks for the fact that many books never recoup their publishing costs. Ebooks are not a scapegoat to be used by the publishing industry to cover those costs, and their prices should not reflect that. If the industry wants to view profits from ebooks as offsetting print costs, that's fine. But to price them such that those costs are reflected in the ebooks' prices is fundamentally wrong in my opinion, and I refuse to support such a pricing model.
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I've never claimed that ebook sales should offset 'printing' costs-except in the general argument mentioned above, about spreading costs over multiple books. Apparently you believe each book should stand alone? What should a publisher do when a book fails to recoup its costs then? If, as you seem to propose, book prices should be set to recoup their own costs only, then the publisher will have minimal, if any, profits to cover those losses-and will quickly go out of business. Not my desired goal.
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Originally Posted by mcl
The publishers delay ebook releases to prop up physical book sales, not to recoup costs of publishing.
I do not have a position on the release time of ebooks. I'd be happy to wait. But I am deeply opposed to pricing ebooks such that they are intended to prop up the print market, in the same way I'd be opposed to MP3s priced to prop up the CD market.
Punitive pricing of new media in order to prop up old media markets is a shortsighted and, frankly, stupid practice by myopic, Luddite publishers of media who would rather fight tooth and nail to preserve their existing business models rather than adapt to the new media and increase their profits.
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Your arguments make sense-for those publishers who refuse to allow ebooks at all. For the others, I only see two approaches that make sense. Either ebook pricing follows pbook pricing (i.e. new releases by best-selling authors are priced fairly high) or media releases follow pricing, i.e. ebook releases will come after (and be priced below) the paperback releases. You appear to be OK with this but, as I mentioned before, you can check other threads to see how most people feel about this. It is a viable alternative to using ebook sales to recoup publishing costs though.
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Originally Posted by mcl
As a case study, look at wax cylinder recordings in the 1800s. Or the sheet music market. or piano rolls. Or cassette tapes. VHS tapes. CD-Rs. DVD-Rs. DVDs. CDs. Records (from 78s to 33 1/3 to 45s). To current streaming media and digital media.
In every case, the media publishers fought desperately to cling to their old business models. In every case, they eventually capitulated. In every case, their cries of "the new media is destroying our market!" were not only wrong, but they wound up profiting more from the new media than they ever did from the old media.
The RIAA has made this mistake. Repeatedly. The MPAA likewise. And now the publishing industry, rather than learning from history, is repeating it in spades.
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In every case the 'old media' publishers weren't fighting the issue on price-they were fighting it on availability. And you're right-some publishers are fighting ebooks on availability, and they'll capitulate just as the other industries have-but the current argument is, as far as I can tell, about the price of ebooks.
There is an interesting analogy to your case studies though-I'm seeing many more anthologies split up, as ebooks, and the stories being sold individually-just as albums have been split up with the songs being sold individually. I'm not sure how that affects the argument though. How much should a short story cost vs a novel? Should there be a difference between a short novel (say 30K words) and a long novel (100K words)?
In short, when arguing about how much a 'book' should cost, we need to look at what it costs to produce. Not just to print, but to *produce* that book. Including the costs of books that were also produced, but didn't sell enough to cover the cost of producing them.