E-book Sales Are Exploding And Hurting Paperbacks, Publishers Say

[rogue_librarian]

Originally Posted by mldavis2

You paid for it and refuse to read it because of errors?

No, I downloaded the free sample chapter and, based on that, decided not to purchase the book.

Originally Posted by mldavis2

Are sloppy eBooks yet another 'clever' effort to convince readers to buy the 'real thing' in paper and pay for editing?

I have actually reason to believe that those same errors exist in the hardcover version as well. So, perhaps they are restricted to the preface? It was still enough to put me off it, so I might never know for sure.

[GA Russell]

Originally Posted by rogue_librarian

[I]One time I remember hearing someone ask my friend George Burne...

Four mistakes in six sentences?...

Make it five mistakes! The man's name was George Burns. He was a famous comedian this side of the ocean.

[Boston]

Publisher pricing on e-books has me boycotting some books that I would buy altogether.

If the e-book is not at least $1 less than the discounted paperback price, I pass.

[ebusinesstutor]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Printed books cut into the sales of hand-written books, too. And codices really munged up the sales of scrolls. Technology happens.

Yes, dammit! The scroll makers should have been protected from all this technology.

[ebusinesstutor]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

No, it means that the new format is not taking away business from competitors, it's taking away business from the existing sales structure.

It's a commonly used term, and she is using it properly.



Your wrench example does not match the paper/ebook example. Here's a better one.

Honeywell puts out a series of high-quality wrenches for $1000, and makes $100 in profit off of each set. A competitor puts out a set of wrenches that are not quite as good for $600, and Honeywell's wrench sales plummet. Honeywell decides to compete, and puts out a set of lower-quality wrenches for $500, and makes $50 in profit off of each set. The lower-quality wrenches sell very well, but the higher-end sales continue to fall.

In that scenario, Honeywell chose to sacrifice the higher-end higher-margin sales to its own lower-cost lower-margin sales, rather than let the competition take its business away. Any time a customer chooses a Honeywell lower-end wrench set over the higher-end wrench set, that is a "cannibalized" sale.

How is an ebook by an author somehow "lower quality" than the paperback or hardcover version of the same book?

Exactly the same words, in a more convenient package. Seems like the same quality to me.

[J. Strnad]

Originally Posted by rogue_librarian

No, I downloaded the free sample chapter and, based on that, decided not to purchase the book.

I have actually reason to believe that those same errors exist in the hardcover version as well. So, perhaps they are restricted to the preface? It was still enough to put me off it, so I might never know for sure.

They look like scanning errors to me, as if the publisher scanned a printed copy rather than converting from an existing digital file.

And I agree: that sample was painful to read. I can't imagine struggling through a whole book of that. It's like someone is sticking you with a pin every few sentences.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by ebusinesstutor

How is an ebook by an author somehow "lower quality" than the paperback or hardcover version of the same book?

Exactly the same words, in a more convenient package. Seems like the same quality to me.

Depends on what features of the book matter to you.

Ebook version is often illegal to loan around to friends. Even if loaning is allowed, hard to casually flip to a page or two to show to a friend at dinner. Hard to annotate; even those programs that allow annotation, don't allow you to switch between underlining, post-its, and three different colors of highlighter for different types of notes. Pictures are lower-quality than is possible in print. Can't have a nice shelf of them to show off--either for status purposes, or to offer to friends. (Baen books are loanable, but there's no simple, convenient way to set up a digital viewing library. Opening Windows Explorer with view set to thumbnails is just not as good as an actual shelf to browse.) Can't easily organize & re-organize books by categories: favorites, nostalgic, not-yet-read, "I read these two the same week so their themes always get tangled in my head and I want them next to each other on the shelf."

Ebooks are terrific for portability and searchability. The font size options are great for those who need them. (Which includes me, from time to time.) But there's plenty of traits of pbooks that are lost in an ebook, which ebook publishers & sellers all try to gloss over.

For casual, read-once purposes, ebooks are superior. For long-term & repeated use, they've got some problems.

[crossi]

Not exactly. In both formats you are buying the same words, but in the paper version you are also buying the paper and cover. It's sort of like buying coffee where they offer a discount if you bring your own cup. In both cases you are getting the same coffee you just are not also buying a cup as well.

[elcreative]

It depends on the author but generally self-edited means the same as lawyers representing themselves... if edited by third party then fine... if the pub houses can't get editing, typo removal etc. correct than it is highly likely that a totally solo author effort will also be bad thus likely to be of "lower quality"

Originally Posted by ebusinesstutor

How is an ebook by an author somehow "lower quality" than the paperback or hardcover version of the same book?

Exactly the same words, in a more convenient package. Seems like the same quality to me.

[carld]

Quality depends on the author. It's entirely possible for a lone author to produce high quality, well edited work. I'm sadly used to finding errors in "professionally" edited books from top publishers as well.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by crich70

I'm assuming you're joking since the Gutenberg Bible was never hand written. He printed up some 200 copies as I understand and only 48 of them are still known to exist. Usually in museum collections and under environmentally controlled conditions to help preserve them as he didn't know of acid free paper.

Actually, all books before the late 19th century were printed on acid free paper. Acidic paper came about as a consequence of large scale industrial paper manufacturing processes developed at that time - which is why books from 1800 are often in better shape than books from 1900.

My school's rare book library had a Gutenberg bible in a special display case (they turned a page each day); it was less yellowed that paperbacks I bought in the 80's.

However, there are a lot of other factors, especially humidity, that can affect old paper.

[Cyberman tM]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

Fan-made digital products will always be higher quality than professional ones. Fans don't need to account for the time they spend on them.

But professionals usually have better resources. Or should have.

In books, they must have the original - which should be digital one way or another, making a transition rather painless.

So the only reason I can see to make an eBook worse than the pBook is that they don't care and want to minimize money spent.
Which, IMO, is merely an initial investment - once you have a program that can do a good conversion, it doesn't evaporate.

Of course, I'm assuming that the digital original contains actual semantic information. I would find it hard to believe that things like titles and quotes and that would not be specially marked in the master copy.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by mldavis2

Gee. You paid for it and refuse to read it because of errors? Are the errors more important than content? No argument, just asking.

Strange question. Do you eat rotten food. Is the rotteness more important than the content?

IMHO, there is NO excuse for poor editing. If an author sends a proof to an editor, they pay big money for those services. If an author writes so poorly that they can't spell in context, they don't deserve to be published.

A lot of very good authors cannot spell. So being able to spell in not required to write a good book. Spelling can always be fixed by an editor.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Cyberman tM

In books, they must have the original - which should be digital one way or another, making a transition rather painless.

Publishers generally don't have a digital copy of any book that's more than a few years old. Until *very* recently, disc storage space was expensive. For corporate purposes, it was too expensive to keep a digital copy of *every single title* published, and possibly several stages of digital production. (And what format should they keep? The PDF, suitable for offset printing in a particular size only, not easily convertible to something with reflow abilities? The Pagemaker file? The Quark XPress file? The (shudder) Microsoft Works file? Some proprietary format that went out of production in 2003?)

When the book fell out of print, they deleted the digital copy. At the latest, when their contract with that author was over, they deleted the copy. If they do happen to have a digital file, they may no longer have the software that opens it, or conversion to a modern format may destroy all the formatting.

Expect any book more than 10 years old, and possibly more than 5, to need to be scanned & OCR'd for ebook production.

Of course, I'm assuming that the digital original contains actual semantic information. I would find it hard to believe that things like titles and quotes and that would not be specially marked in the master copy.

Formatting for print is different from formatting for e-publishing. For print, they can use special fonts for the chapter headers, artistic symbols for section dividers, indent sections without semantic markup, make a single word larger-type for emphasis, and so on. If it's special formatting for that one book, they don't need to create a style or do semantic markup. They made a final print-ready PDF or postscript file that wasn't intended to convert back to another digital format.

Until 10 years ago, all digital production worked that way, and changes have been very slow for most publishers.

[vulcan_girl]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Actually, all books before the late 19th century were printed on acid free paper. Acidic paper came about as a consequence of large scale industrial paper manufacturing processes developed at that time - which is why books from 1800 are often in better shape than books from 1900.

My school's rare book library had a Gutenberg bible in a special display case (they turned a page each day); it was less yellowed that paperbacks I bought in the 80's.

However, there are a lot of other factors, especially humidity, that can affect old paper.

That acid-free paper had a lot of cotton and linen in it. The paper factories bought rags and used it in the paper. Once they had the technology to make cheap paper that was mostly wood pulp, the predecessor to the MMPB was born.