Cheaper e-books will kill us, says publisher

[BuddyBoy]

Originally Posted by tompe

Nobody has said there will be no initial costs. My argument was that after the initial costs the cost per book will be similar to producing only paper versions. In this case latex2html already exists and for people that need to do a conversion it can probably be tweaked to produce good output.

Tommy, one of the problems with mission critical enterprise systems is that they need to be maintained. I work in an environment (not publishing anymore, thank goodness!) where mid-sized organizations spend several hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in support and maintenance - and that's not including the salaries of operators or IT staff.

As to "the initial costs the cost per book will be similar to producing only paper versions," even if the software was completely free that wouldn't be true I'm afraid, because you'd still need to proof each eBook format for layout errors, add any TOC and INDEX hyperlinks, etc. Your conversion software wouldn't be able to add the links unless that data was already present in the original manuscript, of which, unfortunately, most are absent.

[BuddyBoy]

Originally Posted by Phogg

No. Only ebooks need to be proofread.
We have posters saying that on pretty much every thread, so it must be true.

Actually, you do want to proof each version for formatting and conversion errors. And, to put it delicately, unless you are a one-person publishing shop, you also need other proofers to go through the manuscript at each stage just to ensure that no, um, "disgruntled" worker has had some fun with the text.

[BuddyBoy]

Originally Posted by Richard Herley

The crux of the matter is this -- what does the publisher actually do for his money? Whether he's selling a pbook or an ebook, he has to invest in the following:

1. Sourcing the "manuscript"
2. Editing it
3. Converting it into some form which can be mass produced
4. Selling it to middlemen
5. Distribution to middlemen
6. Promotion

Stages 1, 2, 4 and 6 probably require the much same sort of investment whether or not the finished product is electronic.

Stages 3 and 5 will of course be much cheaper with ebooks.

Don't forget 7. Share of overhead.

I remember now why I try to stay out of these discussions. I hope after this one winds down I can stay away for another year or two.

Look, let me try to make a couple of simple points, and please, let everyone let me know if I've made any unsupportable assumptions.

All titles have fixed costs, related to stage 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 7 above. The fixed costs of producing a digital only product will be less than a paper only. Producing both will cost more the producing a paper only but not as much as digital only plus paper only.

All titles have marginal costs for each copy sold. Marginal costs include royalties, wholesale discount, as well as production and distribution.

When an ebook copy is sold to a customer, it decreases the likelihood that the same customer will run out and buy a hardcover.

When an ebook version is available, especially in a non-drm or easy to disable format, it increases the likelihood the good quality pirated copies will make there way to the internet.

When a good quality of an ebook is available in a pirated version on the internet, it decreases the likelihood that a person who downloads it will run out and buy the hardcover version.

Ergo, ebook availability will cannibalize to some extent pBook sales of the same title.

Therefor the marginal costs of an eBook must include a prorated share of the total title fixed costs, the same as hardcovers.

Ergo, the main cost savings for ebooks, when produced in concert with pbooks, is the cost of printing and distribution which amounts to less than $1-2 per hardcover.

Ebooks are often at least $1-2 less than hardcovers.

Therefore, ebooks are not overpriced.

[Gudy]

Originally Posted by BuddyBoy

Look, let me try to make a couple of simple points, and please, let everyone let me know if I've made any unsupportable assumptions.

Here's one: ebooks should compete with hardcovers.

Why?

Considering that a great many books are mass market paperback only these days and never come out as hardcovers, that is one heck of a far-fetched assumption to make. Also, by your argument MMPBs cannibalize hardcover sales, but still I don't see many publishers going the hardcover-only route unless the initial book sales are a total disaster. :-P

So, replace hardcover with paperback, and you'll have yourself a fine argument, one that many people here may actually agree with, as long as the offered ebooks are DRM free. See also: Baen's sales figures.

[Greg Anos]

All of this is fine and good from the publisher side. Let's look at it from the crook side. Furthermore I'm going to grant an unbreakable DRM for your books. No crook cracking and reposting. This is based on the PD work I've done for PG Austrailia.

Dread Pirate Roberts wants to digitize his library. He is ticked off because nobody will sell him a non-DRM copy of his books. So he decides what he will pirate his books. What does he need to run up the Jolly Roger? 1. A computer. OK, he already has that. 2. A scanner. Most cheap consumer printers offer scanners for an extra $20 as part of the package. But put $20 on the bill. 3. OCR software, better than what the printer scanner has. That's run another $100. So the price is $120 as a one time charge, plus labor for each book. How much labor? I have found that for a double proofed book, it takes about 14 hours labor for a 300 page book. One hour for scanning, one hour to OCR conversion of scans, and 12 hours to proof and correct the text.
That's what The Crystal Button (1890) took for PG Australia.

Dread Pirate Roberts may settle for a single pass proofing, which tends to leave about 1 error per 5 pages, (which you see a lot in commercial e-books.)
Cutting the labor down to 8 hours. He may or may not spend another hour putting hyperlinks in. He then makes a rude gesture and uploads the result onto the Darknet. Now any other pirate who wants it can download it.

I have gone to this length to show that the <cost> to create a pirate version, competitive with a commercial version. If a commercial version can't be created as cheaply, then the copyright holder could literally pirate the "pirate" version, and sell that, costing nothing for the conversion.

That's why those of us who've done P.D. work just don't buy the "high" costs for e-books. We've done conversions from paper to HTML, and know wherefore we speak. Now this is for non-image heavy fiction, but those are the prices we are complaining about.

From the reader view point, why be a crook for $5? Not worth it. Make it $25 or more, and people start hoisting up the Jolly Roger. Make it unavailable at any price, and you've got buccaneers all over the place. Hollywood figured this out back in the 1990's. They used to sell VHS move at 60-80 dollars a crack, because people were going to pirate them. And at those prices, people did! Nobody but rental houses bought them, people rented then and pirated them. That's how the Blockbusters in the world got started. Low volume and low profit. Then the trialled selling a movie at under $20. They were swamped by the inidividual demand for the former pirates for the movie and made bundles. Thereafter, Hollywood went the cheap model and the video revenues now exceed the theatrical revenues. And Hollywood was dragged kicking and screaming every inch of the way to all this revenue.

Either a publisher can strip down and compete at those prices, or they'll eventually fail. They pick. They'll never succeed in making a superhighway by paving over existing cow trails, as we say in Texas.

[HappyMartin]

Digital cameras are going to kill photography. Desk top publishing is going to kill design. Synthesizers are going to kill music. Yawn Yawn.

[tlrowley]

A wee bit OT, but there was an interesting post on Smart Bitches, about the cost of self-publishing - print vs. ebook.

Certainly this person's experiences match those of the authors in this thread - ebook publication is not nearly as cheap as we think

[lilac_jive]

Originally Posted by tlrowley

A wee bit OT, but there was an interesting post on Smart Bitches, about the cost of self-publishing - print vs. ebook.

Certainly this person's experiences match those of the authors in this thread - ebook publication is not nearly as cheap as we think

I read that, it was pretty insightful.

[Elfwreck]

Her post compares per-book costs for pbooks (card catalog info, print-on-demand setup costs) with one-time costs for ebooks (photshop upgrade, eBook studio software). She includes proofing & editing costs as the same for both--which they are, if they're done separately; if both are combined, one of those numbers plummets. I've no idea if a single ISBN covers both a pbook & ebook released at the same time.

And with all that, she tags ebooks as more than $1700 cheaper, per title, to produce than [100] pbooks. The ebook has 70% of the production costs of the pbook... assuming that editing costs are equal for both.

From there, the inequity grows; each pbook sold costs more in print, storage, and shipping; each ebook sold costs none of those. If sold online, both have the same accounting hassles.

Nobody here (as far as I know) is saying "ebooks should be free" or even "ebooks should only cost a dollar." They're saying "ebooks should cost notably less than the hardcover, and probably notably less than a paperback."

The only things keeping the prices high are the ridiculous notions that

• every ebook sold is a hardcover not sold,
• every pirated copy is a hardcover's price stolen,
• honest customers need to pay for the company's lack of security and PR skills.

(Lack of security: Unwillingness to attempt to find & prosecute book pirates--surely if someone were distributing several thousand "stolen" pbooks, they'd try to track the person down. Lack of PR skills: publishers/authors that customers like, are less likely to get ripped off.)

[Phogg]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

• every ebook sold is a hardcover not sold,

Well, in my case (before I began this project of replacing my library with ebooks) That is usually true.

However it would be a hardback from a used bookstore.
Very few things have ever come out that I couldn't wait on a used copy of.
I don't think the author or the publisher get a cut of that.

[basschick]

true, and some were best sellers. and to tell the truth, that was fine with me - anything that gets more reasonably priced ebooks to me sooner is a plus.

Originally Posted by Shaggy

Given the quality of a lot of the ebooks I've purchased, they're certainly not putting a lot of time into them. It may take more time to do them well, but many of them are pretty much scanned and then sold "as is" with all sorts of OCR and formatting problems. The high cost of those ebooks certainly had nothing to do with time consuming editing/formatting.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by starrigger

Jon, I don't think that's a representative illustration. When I gave you my files of The Chaos Chronicles for conversion to LFR, I had already spent many, many hours preparing those files so that they'd be in proper shape for conversion. And even at that, I didn't proofread them as thoroughly as I should have, as witness the number of errors that were brought to my attention after they were up. (And I just heard from a reader--there are still some in there!) I've just finished proofing the basic text file of another book to go into production at ereads, and that was as time-consuming as, say, correcting proofs of a book going to press. (Meaning, it was more than several full days of work on my part.) And that was just to give them a clean RTF file.

One thing not mentioned yet is that standard manuscript format for editing purposes is not the same as the format you want for ebooks. (Or for pbooks, for that matter.) Maybe that, too, will change. But right now, you can't take a typical author's Word file and just feed it into conversion software. Not unless you want crappy ebooks.

But, if the book has no special formatting and the Word file has all the changes made to it since the last edit and is the same as the printed copy, then I see no problem tossing it into Book Designer and producing an eBook for the Sony with little effort.

In this day and age, I am surprised it's not all digital. If it was, making eBooks would be a lot easier with less effort and more return for the money.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by phenomshel

Well, now this is what I thought...but was told I was wrong. I'm confused. So maybe from a draft the writer sends in to the publisher and still needs to be proofed and corrected, then yes the time would of course be longer, but I was, like you, referring to a book in digital format, ie: a Word document.

What I was talking about was taking a Word document that was already proofed and ready to be converted. I know it takes time if the source needs to be proofed/edited/formatted. But if things where done right, it would be digital all the way and the source document would be already correct. It would just need formatting at worst case before it's converted.

[starrigger]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

But, if the book has no special formatting and the Word file has all the changes made to it since the last edit and is the same as the printed copy, then I see no problem tossing it into Book Designer and producing an eBook for the Sony with little effort.

In this day and age, I am surprised it's not all digital. If it was, making eBooks would be a lot easier with less effort and more return for the money.

But most writers' Word files don't have the final editing changes in them, because until now there's been little reason to go to that extra work. Plus, there's a whole slew of things that have to be changed from manuscript format to book format: em-dashes, paragraphs tabs, underline to italic, proper centering (which doesn't always hold with conversion), sorting out Word "styles" which can be very useful to a writer but which can screw up the conversion, extra spaces, straight quotes to curly quotes (if you care), etc.

I agree that it should be made simple to take the typesetter's output and convert that. But it isn't--yet. I hope it will be soon.

In the last week, people not on this board have pointed out about half a dozen typos still in the Neptune Crossing ebooks. (#@$%$#@!) I'm debating whether it's worth the effort to go in and fix them. I'm thinking not--because it'll take hours to redo all the conversions, plus trying to get corrected versions to manybooks, feedbooks, and Baen Free Library. I hate not fixing something, but that would be a poor use of my time, I think.

I still think ebooks should be priced as low as possible, but not because making them is simple.

[BuddyBoy]

Originally Posted by Gudy

Here's one: ebooks should compete with hardcovers.

Why?

Considering that a great many books are mass market paperback only these days and never come out as hardcovers, that is one heck of a far-fetched assumption to make. Also, by your argument MMPBs cannibalize hardcover sales, but still I don't see many publishers going the hardcover-only route unless the initial book sales are a total disaster. :-P

So, replace hardcover with paperback, and you'll have yourself a fine argument, one that many people here may actually agree with, as long as the offered ebooks are DRM free. See also: Baen's sales figures.

Actually Gudy, MMPBs do cannibalize hardcover sales, which is why they aren't usually released at the same time as the hardcover.

In order to maximize the profit for a title, the publishers may choose to release it first in hardcover, then about a year later as a MMPB once the hardcover sales have tapered off. Of course some titles start as MMPB right off and some never leave hardcover at all, though the perma-hardcovers are usually non-fiction.

Publishing houses aren't charities, you know.