Quote:
Originally Posted by dharh
What I find sad and disgusting is that often the ebook uses a different editing process (person, whatever) than the printed book.
Ebooks have been the most notorious for spelling, mangled text. Sometimes on the first bloody couple pages. I can tell all they did was use a spell checker, grammar checker, and boom less than a minute per book.
I can only hope this gets better, but in the mean time Ive got various copies of the _same_ book (hardback,paperback,mass production,ebook) and each have different errors. They need to get a process down where all proofing takes place on the source file and the exact same copy goes to all the different finalization processes.
Ebooks should be the easiest, least error prone, cheapest way to sell a book. I understand that there are costs associated with making a book before it gets to the physical form, and that these costs are the majority of the costs. However, an ebook should never be equal to its physical equivalent. 10-20% cheaper is not asking for too much.
When you buy a hardback book you are essentially an 'early' adopter. You are paying a premium for a longer lasting book, perhaps more esthetically pleasing to you, and you are getting it soon after release. At least one of those is the same when buying the ebook version during this time. So as an early buying you can expect to pay a high price for an ebook just released.
When you buy a paperback you are giving up these things to get the book cheaper. You've waited while others have already read it, its not going to last as long, though its not mass market paperback so it can still last several reads if you aren't a freak with your books, and for book lovers its most definitely less esthetically pleasing. If a paperback book can be sold for cheaper so can then the ebook. While the cost of making the paperback is definitely not zero, the ebook version is near enough. From the time between hardback version to paperback the ebook has not cost nearly as much per physical book sold.
When you buy a mass market paperback you have essentially waited several years before buying the book. These things can split in half _during_ the first read. If you aren't careful the pages can come out of the book. Often you can buy whole series, or several books in a series, in a bundle for less than one of these books used to cost as hardback. At this point whats really going on is either the book has not sold enough and thus they are trying to eke out as much as they can at the cheapest cost possible. Or the book has sold well and they are using economies of scale to eke out as much as they can as the cheapest cost possible. Ebooks are perfect at this point. Selling 1 million ebooks for $3.99 a pop will garner much more profit than selling a few hundred thousand mass paperback books for $6.99 a pop.
I have been hoping that i'd be able to stop having to buy paperbacks altogether, but if an ebook is going to cost me the same then i'm going to have to stick with what i've been doing. Physical books have the added bonus of having a second hand market, which can often lower the price of getting a book in half, whereas ebooks do not. This has to be accounted for in the ebook business otherwise is doomed to marginal sales.
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I agree with you - ebooks should be cheaper, and selling a million ebooks for $3.99 a pop could indeed be more profitable than selling a few hundred thousand mass market paperbacks. One problem right now is that if you sell three hundred thousand paperbacks (a huge number by today's standards) you will likely only sell 15,000 ebooks and that's a big seller in ebooks.
That which you only sell to 5% of your market does not give you economy of scale.
As for selling used paperbacks, I find very few places will give half cover for a used paperback - it's more like 10-15% and they try to sell it for half.
Still, your initial points are dead on.