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Originally Posted by djgreedo
I think you're dramatically underestimating the costs to the publisher and probably overestimating how much return they are likely to get from the ebook version (in the short term, which is all the shareholders care about).
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Shareholders' concern for short-term stock prices is crippling if not destroying American business. But that's a totally different rant.
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Firstly, a publisher isn't going to hire a bored college student to do this work.
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No, they're probably not. But they should be.
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Believe it or not they would hire professionals who would be getting paid a lot more than $10 per hour.
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Yeah, they probably would. That doesn't mean it's what they
should be doing. Look at the PG Distributed Proofreading project. Anyone can sign up and help proofread their scans of public-domain books. Not professionals, just the average Joe. Books that have been through PGDP are of significantly higher quality than most ebooks scanned/OCR'd by commercial publishers. It would appear that proofreading does not demand exotic and expensive skills, just an attention to detail: does
this look like
that? Hell, they could outsource it to China for that matter. You don't even need to know English to see if
this looks like
that.
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I think several thousand dollars is a conservative estimate for getting a book into ebook format if the book wasn't already in electronic format.
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Your estimate of the cost being more reliable than mine because ... ?
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When the publisher sells that ebook, some of the 'cover price' is going towards overheads, royalties, the retailer, etc. To recover the costs of creating an ebook they may have to sell hundreds or even thousands of copies. And ebook sales are still a tiny fraction of the book market.
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Royalties: 15% of cover on a good day. Overhead: bandwidth, which compared to how much they waste on unnecessary glitz on their websites, is trivial. Retailer: that would be themselves. Slap it up on the website and sell it.
If, to be hugely conservative, they sell an ebook for $5, and give the author $1 for it, just to keep the numbers round, selling only 50 ebooks would provide $1000 in gross revenue. That would pay for the conversion right there, with money left over for donuts for the office.
Scanning, OCRing, proofreading, and formatting books is
not some esoteric skill that requires years of training and experience. It's something done by volunteers the world over, many of them people right here in these forums. It's something you can get college students to do for minimum wage, or random people on the Web for that matter. We're
already doing it.
Ebook sales are a small part of the book market because of a number of factors:
- high prices
- poor quality
- DRM
- the cost of reading devices
- backlist availablity
Selling more and better ebooks cheaper will alleviate three of those. Doing away with DRM (which has been successful for Baen, as an example) will remove another. More ebooks available will increase the demand for ebook readers, which will potentially lower the device cost, thereby (along with the availability of desired books) will increase device sales. More people with ebook readers means more demand for ebooks.
There's a market out there. There's a potentially huge market. The publishers need to focus on creating and expanding that market, not stifling it.