Cheaper e-books will kill us, says publisher

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Xenophon

Which brings me to my alternate proposal. Why not use the Web for what it's good for (disintermediation, that is) and wipe out the distributors (mostly) and the retailers (to some degree).

<Applause>

Absolutely. Web retailers - useful. Most people don't want to have to visit 50 sites to see what new books are out this month.

Web distributors - completely unnecessary. Except for DRM. DRM makes the distributor necessary - you can't give DRM keys to all the (potentially) hundreds of retailers. DRM requires a monopoly or near monopoly of supply.

One more reason why DRM is bad for publishers. It costs them lots of money.

[zyzzyva57]

Microsoft's major problem is refusal to accept the ever changing reality that our computers are heading back to being dumb terminals--well, maybe semi-dumb terminals

Apple is hitting a wall charging double what a Window machine costs

Publishers and authors will regret charging us non-kindle users double the price for a book

Reality 1-0-1, like Karma, can be your friend or enemy

[mjh215]

Originally Posted by zyzzyva57

Microsoft's major problem is refusal to accept the ever changing reality that our computers are heading back to being dumb terminals--well, maybe semi-dumb terminals

I am a little confused by this statement, just wondering if you could clarify. If you are referring to using applications online, such as applets as a replacement for software on the system and the system primarily consisting of an OS just to get online then that is something Microsoft has been pushing for years. They have long wanted all your applications to be run under IE from a server, so they could move to providing software as a service license and not as a purchased license. It has actually been an unwillingness on the part of the consumer as to why this hasn't panned out. (IMHO for a variety of good reasons) And Gates has really being pushing the concept of tablet pc's and net-books with similar technologies for longer then I can recall.

I'm not arguing against you, or -for- MS's implementations, I honestly just wanted to clarify what you meant and what they've done or wanted to do thru the years...

-MJ

[dadioflex]

Edit.

[Gaurnim]

Originally Posted by dadioflex

On pricing. If you're a gamer you may have already seen this:

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/new...hp?story=22378

It's an article on Gabe Newell's recent DICE address, amongst which it discusses how cutting the price of games offered through Steam (a download service) led to considerable increase in sales and more importantly an overall increase in revenue.

I've enjoyed a lot of Gamasutra articles in the past.
It will surely be among the first RSS feeds I add on my Cybook when I start playing with them.

Thx for the link.

[JSWolf]

Let's say an eBook costs $15. Let's say the author makes 25% of the sales. That means the author gets $3.75 per copy sold.

Now let's lower the price to say $6.00 and at 25%, the author makes $1.50 per copy sold.

10 people purchase the $15 copy so the author makes $37.50.
All it takes is 25 people to purchase the same eBook at $6.00 to make $37.50.

I think it may be more realistic to think that the author will get more in sales at $6.00 then $15.

So keep the prices reasonable and sales should probably happen.

[dadioflex]

Edit.

[pcmedic]

I haven't read all the comments, but I have a similar take to most of the people here. By pricing ebooks at nearly the same price as physical books, publishers who think short term like the one in the article are making the same mistake as the music industry did. By pricing high, more people are apt to pirate the work. I know there are up-front costs, but with a physical book, there are hard costs that are in every copy (paper, ink, warehousing, shipping, etc) that you will never have in an ebook.

Speaking for myself, if someone were to charge me $15 for an ebook, I might buy one copy if it's something I really want, but after that I am looking for different sources. But, if the same book were $4-6, I am probably going to buy many more books from them. In the long run, they will make a lot more from me and I will be a happy customer. Additionally, if the prices are reduced, people are much more likely to take a chance on a new author.

David S.

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

10 people purchase the $15 copy so the author makes $37.50.
All it takes is 25 people to purchase the same eBook at $6.00 to make $37.50.

Or, if the author's sold them directly for $5 a book they could make it by selling 8 books.

BOb

[Phogg]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

Or, if the author's sold them directly for $5 a book they could make it by selling 8 books.

BOb

That is how I prefer to buy music. If the musician has a website with decent prices I buy direct.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Charbax

Niche authors are not read by anyone in the current system and are not viable business for a moms and paps small niche publishing company.

90% of my reading is niche. I support small publishing companies. Recently, that's Baen (perhaps not so small), Torqued Press, and Freya's Bower. According to your model, I should have to wade through listings of thousands of books I'm not interested in, to find the ones I want to read.

Retailers, distributors, publishers, editors must go. We all know they are completely irrelevant.

May I direct you to Fanfiction.net, where the majority of the writing has no editing, and certainly there are no pesky retailers, distributors or publishers involved?

Almost half a million Harry Potter stories alone. You may never need to read another word in print.

However, many professional authors *like* that their publishers provide these services. They don't want to do their own proofreading, nor hunt down qualified people to do it for them, so they pay a publisher a percentage of their book's income to find someone. They don't want to create & buy ads to promote their book, nor find magazines or online sites where it would be appropriate, so they pay the publisher a percentage for that, too. They don't want to format their book into book-sized pages, and choose a nice font for the chapter headers, so they pay the publisher for that. They don't want to find someone to draw a cover for them, so again...

The nice thing about Web 2.0 is that an author who wants complete control of her creation, write-edit-format-distribute, can take it. But not every author wants those hassles; if they wanted to advertise books for a living, they'd work in a sales job.

Advance payment, publicity and marketing, lawyers whatever else is also completely irrelevant with the advent of Web technologies.

Can Web technologies pay my rent while I'm waiting for my book to get popular? Does the electric company take "I'm an author, and I'm good at it, so you shouldn't charge me for six months" instead of a check?

Advance money is managed by Web 2.0 quite simply by proven track record of popularity, quality and number of fans.

Ah! So *first-time* authors need to be independently wealthy; after that, they can rest on their laurels. Authors whose quality takes a dive will get a free ride for at least one book.

And that Web 2.0 money is going to be financed through a tax that is much more efficient and which basically is the same as a global standardized subscription plan.

You still haven't said which government & banks will be managing this money, and who will be writing the regulations involved. Nor how or whether people who have no home internet will be taxed. (I know plenty of people who only get online at the library. How will you tell the difference between "person w/o computer, who does use online resources" and "person with no connection to the Web?")

[cstross]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

Or, if the author's sold them directly for $5 a book they could make it by selling 8 books.

... Assuming of course that the author wants to go into retail, marketing, sales, and distribution.

I, for one, don't want to go there. I write because I want to write; from my point of view, the publisher takes care of the boring but necessary business of turning what I write into money. I could do that stuff, but it's not only boring but time-consuming; I'd have to divert a lot of the time I currently spend on writing to selling stuff, keeping accounts, and so on. Even with ebooks -- selling direct without DRM, either via stores like Fictionwise or via my own blog and CMS, which I'm capable of doing -- there are overheads: copy-editing, typesetting, keeping accounts, collecting VAT (essential if you want to stay on the right side of the law, and it cuts in at a surprisingly low threshold).

I know a guy who has successfully broken into print by breaking the rules: he self-published his novel, had a couple of palets of books delivered to his garage, then hit the road and sold it hard (mostly targeting schools -- he's a YA author). He's now with a major publisher and happy to leave the 60 hour weeks of sales-and-marketing activity to the professionals. Not because he couldn't do it, but simply because it was a distraction from the core business of writing.

I'm not an accounts clerk, subeditor, web storefront programmer, and art director. I can do that stuff (probably not as well as a full-timer, but adequately) ... but it would take time away from my writing. Far better to let someone else do it for me, in return for a cut.

[dadioflex]

Edit.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by dadioflex

Could someone give me the phone number for this Web 2.0 we're talking about, please. Will it work with my 1200/75 modem?

Web 2.0 is the next step towards HappyWeb. 2.0 may not work on your modem, but HappyWeb will!

[ssaxt0]

Here is my take on the comments in this interview. He is speaking gibberish in this interview. Do they believe that we are stupid? Converting formats from pdf to other formats is software related and once a program ios developed or purchased, there is no additional cost. How is the infrastructure different, you still need to track sales for paperbacks and hard cover books so what is difference here. The mention of margins nails it because this is the bottom line for the reason, they want to continue recieving those margins and if they are bigger, that much the better. The margins they are recieving for eBooks are huge compared to paperback if you charge the same price.

I just went buy Walmart and saw $7.99 books selling for $5.97 so these are the overflow books from major bookstores that did not seel and Walmart is selling them for a profit. If Walmart does not sell them, it goes back to the publisher to make more pulp for new books at a loss to the company. For eBooks, there is no waste, no shipping charges or returns to the publisher. Have they even considered this? No, it is all about profit.