[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by riemann42

As long as people think ebooks are less valuable than hard back books then publishers will value them less than hard back books. Expect delays and poor quality. If people are willing to pay hard back prices for ebooks, publishers will start to respect them more, and they will be more valuable.

The hardcover and the ebook will be produced from the same source file.

Once a manuscript has been line edited, copy edited, proofread (and, sometimes, reviewed by legal to make sure assertions made in it can be proven if someone takes offense and sues), it goes to DTP, who typeset and markup. The end result is a PDF that gets sent to the printer, and the printer's imagesetter uses that to generate the plates from which the book will be printed.

Part of the problem for ebooks is that a PDF isn't always the desirable format, and the output needs conversion to other formats. For instance, every publisher I know uses Adobe InDesign to do typesetting and markup. InDesign can output to ePub format - badly. Producing good ePub files requires well formed XML as the starting point. There are tools to do that, but they aren't widespread. And it the desired output format isn't ePub yet more massaging is required.

And you are still at the mercy of the source file. Things like copy-editing and proofreading are increasingly being skipped to lower costs, and no amount of wizardry in the ebook file creation stage can compensate for poor quality control before it gets turned into an ebook.

Amazon, and to a much lesser extent BN, did ebooks a huge disservice by selling them so cheap. Now there are actually people who rant about books costing more than $9.99, tagging them on Amazon, etc. The damage is done, I think, but we'll see. Maybe people will get used to $14, $15, even $20 for a new release.

The publishers ranted a bit on that exact point, accusing Amazon of giving the consumer unrealistically low expectations of what ebooks should cost. B&N is locked in competition with Amazon, and pretty much has to be competitive on price.

Amazon brought to mind the fable of the goose and the golden eggs. Do things as a retailer that damage the health of the vendors whose products you sell, and you see short term gains but don't do yourself favors long term. That said, I think Amazon cried crocodile tears when they "lost" the argument with the publishers over pricing and bowed to the agency pricing model. They used predatory pricing to gain market share, and did their best to lock ebook buyers into them. Having done so, they can raise prices on hot ebook titles, make more on each sale, and blame the publishers for the price rise. Win-win...

One more note: Publishers have to get good at notifying sellers to lower the price when a paperback is released. That's part of the whole deal, right?

That probably requires work on both the publisher's and the retailer's part.

Exactly how does the publisher tell the retailer the PB is out? Generally, they announce the new PB releases, and the retailer's buyers commit to X number of copies. Translating that to lowering prices on ebook editions is likely more a task for the retailer, as somebody doing catalog maintenance must apply the requisite pricing change.

Whether this happens may depend on a variety of factors. There are publishers out there that price ebooks to begin with at hardcover prices (and I believe there are instances where the book doesn't have a hardcover edition, and is first released as a mass market PB, so you'll see an ebook costing a lot more than the PB copy.) What the retailer pays the publisher for the book will be contractually specified. Depending upon the publisher and the retailer and the exact language of teh contract, thre will be a price for the hardcover, a price for the ebook, and a price for the PB, but there won't necessarily be a lock step relationship between them. The publisher might not lower the cost of the ebook to the retailer when the mass market PB edition comes out. The publisher sets the pricing, and they don't have to drop the ebook price to the retailer to be competitive with the PB.
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Dennis