ebooks...the price ascent to 'Everest'....

[DHR]

Originally Posted by oldyellr

Calibre does not break DRM at all. That can only be done with an undocumented third party add-on that you have to find and install. That would be like Making Firefox illegal because it enables you to get to pirate websites.

Sorry, I've never used Calibre. I've just seen people mention using it to strip DRM.

On a forum, I've seen bragging about stripping DRM from a Toronto Public Library ebook, using Calibre, so that the book could be "borrowed" indefinitely.

But you're right about changing platforms. I guess I'll have to throw out all the books I have on 5-1/4" floppy disks.

Surely those books have no DRM so they should be easy to move forward.

I, for example, own a copy of the Encyclopaedia Britanica on CD. It does have its own kind-of DRM so it is now useless to me.

Any platform (note: I didn't say medium) with DRM is very likely hard to migrate from without breaking DRM. For example, converting DRMed mobi books to DRMed epub books is unlikely to happen unless it is done by the publisher.

[DHR]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Other than a few rare books that went for big $$$ I've personally never sold a book and rarely given one away although I have loaned them out.

What is your end game for books you own?

If you just read them and then discard them (a perfectly reasonable thing to do), you have nothing to lose with the current ebook regimes.

If you hoard them like I do, then there are real risks to your collection. You cannot be confident that you will still have access to them in a few years. You cannot transfer them to someone else.

On the bright side, the physical storage space required by an ebook is a lot smaller than that required by a mechanical book.

For myself the convenience factors that eBooks present are a big plus and I can still load books by loaning out an old reader with the book(s) on it.

Loaning old readers doesn't scale very well -- DRM limits how many readers can be authorised on a single account and how many old readers do you have anyway. Perhaps it works well enough for you.

Entirley possible if you don't pay attention to things and convert older formats at the time new formats start becoming prevalent. ePub is basically just a zip file with XHTML inside (Mobi's basically HTML inside too). I doubt either HTML or ZIP (or the ability to utilize them) are going anywhere in my lifetime so I hope to have a way to read/convert my books even if ePub and Mobi were to disappear tomorrow.

With DRM, it is highly unlikely that you, the owner of a copy, can choose to convert that copy between formats. Unless you break DRM.

Digital Rights Management enforces what the publisher / platform owner chooses to give you as "rights". Converting away from a DRM system is not likely one of them. Certainly not one you can count on.

I have had stuff stranded on old media (without DRM). I gave away a box of 78 RPM records because I don't have a player for them. I have a large box of 9 track computer tapes and no drive to read them. I have some 5.25" floppies that may no longer be readable. I even have a paper tape for my Altair with the original Micro Soft BASIC and no paper tape reader. That's another problem, one caused purely by my procrastination.

[Reader Paradice]

Originally Posted by p_a_smith

I've always been curious about this arguement. It assumes that the only difference between an ebook and a paperback book is the costs to actual print a book (which I have heard estimated at $3.50/book).

Certainly there are fixed costs no matter what format you produce a book. You have to pay the author, cover artist, the editor, the publisher, and the seller as well as for promotion when the book is launched (so very time limited costs for advertising if any are bothered with).

Yet as the electronic age progresses those fixed costs have come down. Publishers now demand manuscripts in electronic format to cut editing costs and rely heavily on electronic means of advertising (email lists, social media, fan groups etc). And after the basics of the manuscript are done some real differences start to creep into the equation.

For print books you need to store the books you have printed, pay to ship them to the distributor, and cover the reality that some of them will be damaged/not sell and you will take a loss on them. (If you go print on demand you cut out storage but run the risk that your reader will not want to wait 2-3 weeks for the book). That assumes of course that you can connect your product to the customer. Anyone outside of the city bookstores know the hit and miss choices in smaller stores where you are lucky to find anything except bestsellers or recent offerings and the extra costs of online booksellers where you pay to have them shipped to you unless you buy in bulk.

Electronic books exist as a small file on a server which costs pennies to store, virtually nothing to ship, and you have a 24/7 worldwide distribution network that has no problem stocking all of your books, not just the ones most recently published, to make available to your customers whenever they want. Plus once that e-book is formatted it is ready for you to sell forever (yeah I know formats will change at some point but honestly converting formats in books is getting simpler each year).

As well you limit the accessibility of the book itself. Ebooks that are purchased can not be lent (or can in very controlled ways) or sold. Which means you have sold your book to a reader who is pretty much the only one who can read it- certainly not the case with print books. Meaning that you will sell more ebooks than print groups to the same group of people who want to read the book because you can make each one pay. (Arrangements with libraries vary around the world but some pay for the rights to offer a book so many times and then have to renew that license to be able to continue to offer the book. Quite the bonanza compared with print copies).

I don't expect to pay $.99 for ebooks but would like ebook pricing to reflect the reality rather than illusion that publishers would like us to believe. Personally I think those publishers like Baen who offer books for 30-40% off the paperback prices (and don't raise the ebook prices on older stock once it has been issued) are actually treating readers fairly.

------------------------------------------------

Well stated! Your post cohesively 'puts it out there for the eBook consumer'. We truly have the power to rebuke the pittance differential in eBook vs. pBook suggested list prices and Agency stipulated....with the slamming shut of our wallets and purses, of our purses and wallets! Money talks, B.S. walks. It always will.... I plan to use my financial withholding if I do not see a reversal this year of the escalating asking prices of the new reads. Again, this is being ramped up since the publishing houses saw gangbuster sales and interest this last Christmas season, for the eReader format.

[therealjoeblow]

What pisses me off even more is the poor quality control on eBook production. In *several* retail books where the eBook cost was equal to the printed book cost I've found:

• Broken paragraphs
• Missing quotes
• Spelling errors
• Inconsistent formatting within the book

I find this just plain unacceptable - would a publisher allow this kind of crap into the printed version? I doubt it - so why do they let it go in an eBook???

The REAL Joe

[Rizla]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I'm afraid that I must repeat that your assertion that "There is very little work required in making the ebook" is quite simply false.

Scanning and formatting an ebook is insignificant in terms of the production process. Publishers are simply gouging purchasers.

[dee_can]

I haven't spent more than $8 (before tax) for an ebook. I just can't see myself spending past $10 per book. Some of the higher priced books I've tried to buy when there is a discount code, but some publishers don't even allow discounts. You would think it's more expensive to produce a 'real' book than it is to produce an ebook, so you would think the price would be a little lower - not than I'm sure about this, though.

I get most of my books in the $4.99 or less 'aisle' of Kobo, or I borrow ebooks from the library.

[hpulley]

My old paperback novels look like sepia mode on the Vox now so they are NOT long term investments. Good hard cover editions on good paper have done better but pulp is not forever. Where did I put my stone tablet editions?

[Gaffer]

Originally Posted by Rizla

You are talking rubbish. Scanning and formatting an ebook is insignificant. Publishers are simply gouging purchasers.

I doubt that many ebooks are scanned - most would be converted from the same electronic versions that are submitted to the publishers for traditional books. I do agree, however, that the costs for eBooks should be substantially lower than for printed books.

[Rizla]

No printing, transportation, storage or paying of store staff salaries. They're having a laugh!

[EricLandes]

Originally Posted by p_a_smith

I don't expect to pay $.99 for ebooks but would like ebook pricing to reflect the reality rather than illusion that publishers would like us to believe. Personally I think those publishers like Baen who offer books for 30-40% off the paperback prices (and don't raise the ebook prices on older stock once it has been issued) are actually treating readers fairly.

The biggest problem is paper is still 70-80% of publisher revenue. The major publishers can not price ebooks they way they probably should ($6 or so) because they can't afford to undercut their primary source of revenue.

In an ebook-only environment, pretty much all your costs are fixed before the book goes on sale. Once the book's on sale, you want to price it for maximum total revenue. (All royalty and other payments from this point are percentage based, not per-copy, so the number of copies sold is actually irrelevant. It's the revenue that matters.)

So, if your ebook point of maximum revenue is $4 that's where you'd want to price it. But that's going to kill paper sales. It's a huge quandary for the publishers right now, particularly since the whole industry mindset is geared towards pricing per copy.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by HarryT

This is nonsense. Virtually all the work that's involved in the production of a book (editing, layout, advertising, etc) is also there for an eBook. The only thing you don't have are the printing costs, which typically account for around 10-20% of total costs. An eBook that is priced 20% lower than the corresponding paperback is, therefore, reasonably priced.

Only if it's a new release. A backlist ebook doesn't have the editing, marketing, and other overhead costs--that was all done the first time. The backlist paperback has production costs that can't drop below a certain level, and if the print run is smaller, those go up.

An ebook has no specific individual production costs, and should be priced as low as possible to maximize profits. Sellers should be studying the markets to find where the "sweet spot" is, rather than assuming they'll sell X books and therefore need to price them at $Y to make the same profit they would off the same number of paperback sales.

As far as I can sort out, the mainstream publishers are under the impression that a book's sales run is done after 6 months (or 6 months after each paper release), so they need the higher prices in order to make more profit during that stretch. There's absolutely no comprehension that the book-buying public is oblivious to their schedules, and wants a copy of a book when they hear about it--which could mean two weeks after it's released, or twelve years later.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Gaffer

I doubt that many ebooks are scanned - most would be converted from the same electronic versions that are submitted to the publishers for traditional books. I do agree, however, that the costs for eBooks should be substantially lower than for printed books.

Most newer ebooks are not scanned; backlist books from more than 5-10 years ago generally are. Most publishers didn't keep their print-ready files once the book had gone out of print--because they'd be reformatting from scratch for a new edition anyway. And cheap digital storage is a relatively new thing; while anyone can save a few ebooks, saving an entire production company's line would take both a lot of archive space, and a lot of administration costs to figure out how to manage them.

What do you keep? The PDF ready for print? It would need to be converted & reformatted. (10-year-old PDFs? Convert them & get hard returns at the end of every line.) The QuarkXpress or Pagemaker file you used to make the PDF? Or maybe you used Microsoft Works. Maybe you used a proprietary program that you eventually abandoned for Indesign--what do you do with those older files now? Do you keep the final .doc/.rtf version from before any of the formatting was done--except that some editing was done after that, to make the page breaks work out. Or all of those? How do you name them in the archive--not long ago, most filenames were limited to 8.3; you need an archiving system just to recognize them 6 years later.

... And so on. The idea of "keep ALL the files; they might be useful someday" is new; for a very long time, publishers have been working with "throw it out once you're not making money from it" to conserve space and resources.

I don't blame them for needing to scan; I'm just upset that they apparently don't bother to proofread the scans at all, and nobody checks the final ebook version before they start selling it.

[MrPLD]

You're all missing the crux... It's not what the "real cost" of the book is that determines ebook sale price, it's what the market will tolerate. If people are happy paying 75% of the pBook cost for an eBook in sufficient numbers, then there's no real point in changing. Remember, it's business, and in business you do your best to maximise your margins. Having 50% of the market buying at 75% the pBook pricing is vastly better than 100% at 25%.

It's not about what's "right" ethically/morally - it's about maximising that revenue. Some see it as gouging, but they're in insufficient numbers to actually matter in the math.

Originally Posted by hpulley

My old paperback novels look like sepia mode on the Vox now so they are NOT long term investments. Good hard cover editions on good paper have done better but pulp is not forever. Where did I put my stone tablet editions?

Long term ... stone table ... wow! We have an immortal amongst us!

Seriously though, I typically read 30 to 60 year old paperbacks. I would be shocked if any DRMed ebooks last that long and would even be surprised if companies like Amazon still exist. (Keep in mind that most of the tech giants of today are significantly less than 40 years old and most of the tech giants from bygone eras were bought up or went under.)

[ballfresno]

I just don't find any need to compare the price of an ebook to a paper book. If I want an ebook, and if D>P as nogle said earlier, then I buy it; if not, I don't. What the paper book costs just doesn't come into the equation.

Simple economics, basically.

However, I do get annoyed if I have bought an ebook and find that the production quality is crap. This is where ebooks are more difficult than paper books: difficult to check before purchase.